I discovered Isabel Coixet thanks to her absolutely amazing film My Life Without Me and since I have been disappointed by both The Secret Life of Words and Elegy.

Elegy is a slow-paced film about a shallow character, Cultural Critic David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), who struggles to establish any form of human relationship. The film focuses on the relationship he develops with his former student Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz). As his interest develops from superficial attraction through obsession into dependence and finally love, one sees how he is also struggling against growing old and admitting his needs. The twist at the end which brings David and Consuela back together after two years apart is under-developed and hangs on an easy dramatic cliché.

In addition to the main love story, the film brings together a series of caricatural male characters and presents us with their dysfunctional relationships: Aside from the main character David, whose infatuation for Consuela does not stop him from his regular sex sessions with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), his friend George (Dennis Hopper) who has serial affairs with his students and David's son Kenneth (Peter Sarsgaard) who is in the midst of an affair.

The premise of the film begs a level of subtlety, intelligence and character development which Coixet unfortunately does not do justice to. Ben Kingsley's acting leaves a lot to be desired and his attempt to portray a liberal and cultured man who is at the same time constrained by his fear of real life is stilted. Dennis Hopper is awful, as usual. The high of the film is Patricia Clarkson who oozes beauty and elegance and is a great contrast to Penelope Cruz's far overrated beauty and poor acting. Even Peter Sarsgaard cannot salvage his wet character from the depths of insipidness, which may be a plus for his acting but not for the film.

Occasional clumsy narrative and casting flaws serve as irritations: Consuela, a Cuban girl who moved to the States with her family at the young age of eleven, has a thick Spanish accent which makes this fact impossible to swallow. Her straight lines jarr against the curves of her caricature Cuban family, and the comparison between her and Goya's "Maja Vestida" is laughable (though the inherent alusion to the "Maja Desnuda" is supposedly a testimony to the film's intellectual depth). A scene in David's dark-room which betrays the fact that he knows nothing about developing black and white photographs. And last, but definitely not least, Penelope Cruz's mundane "beauty" which makes it impossible to image her at the centre of any kind of infatuation.

The film tries to explore what could be an interesting and subtle story but at best leaves a benevolent audience doing most of the legwork. Coixet has shown well in the past that slow pace can be a virtue, that empty spaces can vibrate with depth and that often too many pointless words are spoken. Unfortunately for Elegy, here she gets caught up in a form of pseudo-intellectual arrogance which mistakenly believes that true substance can always be replaced by slow pace, empty spaces and unspoken words.