The professor of desire
Check out the trailer for Elegy featuring the suddenly omnipresent Señor Kingsley and a reliable indie contingent: Penélope Cruz, Patricia Clarkson, Dennis Hopper and Peter Sarsgaard. I love how literature can tart up the most commonplace of fetishes, a man’s mammary fixation:
Of all the good actors who have adorned the middle-aged-professor films… Ben Kingsley, in Elegy, based on Philip Roth’s 2001 novel The Dying Animal, is the most formidable and convincing. Kingsley’s David Kepesh is a literature professor at Columbia and a regular virtuoso performer on public television and NPR… Kingsley, who is sixty-four, has the grizzled barrel chest of an aging sexual warrior… a plausibly selfish man, a man who has narrowed life down to his own needs and pleasures. He will not be imposed upon.
At the end of the semester, he seduces a graduate student, Consuela (Penélope Cruz, again), who’s meant to be in her late twenties… Cruz’s body, especially her bare chest… is treated as one of the wonders of all creation… David’s friends–including a smart businesswoman who is his longtime occasional lover (Patricia Clarkson) and a teasingly affectionate and possibly envious New York poet (Dennis Hopper)–are written and played with real bite. [New Yorker]
The international trailer is very different in tone:
Director Isabel Coixet previously did Mi Vida Sin Mí (My Life Without Me) and the very affecting ‘Bastille’ segment of Paris, Je T’Aime. Here it is in its entirety:


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