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Forgiveness in the Eye of the Beholder (Elegy, 2008)
The search continues
I’m not by nature a romance girl. I steer clear of romance films — it’s all I can do to balance my romantic nature. I persist in the belief that I don’t need anyone else’s fantasies clouding up my own, overbearing as they are, and becoming more so as I get older.
Still, I occasionally indulge in the odd romance film, and last night, I sat down to watch Elegy (2008). Based on Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal, it recounts the love affair between an aging professor and his much younger student. A tale as old as time, yet Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz come together to breathe new life into the story.
The plot I won’t tell you because you already know it. The lifelong philanderer meets a woman 30 years his junior and for the first time falls genuinely in love. In parallel, it just so happened that I was reading Anton Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog. The plot is, in many ways, so similar that I have to wonder whether Roth drew consciously (or subconsciously) on it.
There are, however, subtle differences. In Chekhov’s short story, it’s the man who insists on turning a brief affair into a permanent recurrent arrangement, much to the younger woman’s torment. In Roth’s story (and subsequently, in the film), the relationship breaks apart when the aging…
