Finally back in the saddle after a luxuriously long absence, I’m returning = with a fresh palate. For almost a month, I didn’t set foot in a movie theatre. Saw a bunch of stuff on DVD—Michael Mann’s big screen version of Miami Vice was an especially guilty pleasure—but I’m just now catching up on some the movies I’ve missed. I did see Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona in Cannes, but last night I was happy to see  it again (as a date movie with my wife). It’s even better than I remembered, and best enjoyed as a summer treat rather than under the harsh scrutiny of Cannes. Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz are dynamite, and this could be the comedy that finally wins Woody back his audience 16 years after mortifying them by leaving Mia Farrow for her adopted child, who’s now virtually middle-aged.

Among this weekend’s releases, meanwhile, Penélope Cruz pops up again in Elegy, a May-December romance with Ben Kingsley. It’s worth a look. And for an more exotic tale of romantic havoc, I highly recommend Tuya’s Marriage, a Chinese film about a Mongolian shepherdess that won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin Film Festival.

Elegy

May-December romance has become a staple of the art house. It carries a frisson of intellectual eros, conveniently pairing a young beauty with an aging thespian. And as youth worships genius and genius worships youth, these bittersweet romances have a fatal symmetry. They are inevitably doomed. The tone is elegiac. And the protagonist is is almost invariably the male—very often an artist of some sort who is finally forced to confront his own mortality in the adoring eyes of a woman he can never fully possess.

In recent years, we’ve seen a variety of Serious Actors tackle such roles: Anthony Hopkins as a college professor seduced by a gum-snapping Nicole Kidman in The Human Stain (2003); Peter O’Toole as a septuagenarian actor who courts a teenage punk in Venus (2006); and, most memorably, Frank Langella as washed-up novelist who’s waylaid by a literary vixen in Starting Out in the Evening (2007).

Elegy, starring Penélope Cruz, and Ben Kingsley offers the latest spin on the May-December genre, and if it bears some resemblance to The Human Stain, that’s because it, too, is based on a novel by Philip Roth, The Dying Animal, and Kingsley’s character, a libidinous professor named David Kepesh, seems closely related to Coleman Silk, the libidinous professor played by Hopkins in The Human Stain. Hey, it’s a small world.

But a couple of things distinguish Elegy from Venus or Starting out in the Evening. First, although he’s in his 60, Kingsley’s Kepesh is hardly a tired old geezer. He’s a fully functioning sexual animal at the top of his form, a predatory prof with the good sense never to hit on his female students until after he’s graded them—then he singles out his prey at his annual post-semester cocktail. Continue…