time passes when you're not looking --

This was an impulse buy from the small DVD shop next to my house. I originally purchased it for the alluring synopsis on the bootleg backcover: 

"Driven by Isabel Coixet's visually assured and deepy observant direction,"Elegy" charts the passionate relationship between a celebrated college professor and a young woman whose beauty both ravishes and destabilizes him. As their intimate connection transforms them more than either could image, a charged sexual conquest evolves into an indelible love story. With humanistic warmth, wry wit and erotic intensity, "Elegy" explores the power of beauty to blind, to reveal and to transform."

But this film is more than that. So much more. It shows the power of beauty and infatuation and its ability to cripple a person with a regression to adolescent behaviors. It turns an independent, confident man into someone weak and submissive lacking the ability to leave his bed.

It makes you realize that beauty is fleeting, and so is youth. After all, time makes fools of us all. As we see David Kepesh dive further into despair because of the ever widening gap between him and the Cuban beauty Consuela Castillo, it made me understand the small crevices in a relationship that can pull two people apart and become gulfs and canyons of distance.

There is no 'happily ever after' at the end of this film.

Instead, there is a hospital bed.

There is a woman, who sadly questions the damage to her pristine, youthful body. And there is a man, past his prime, continuing to chase the ghosts of relationships past.

"But when you are 17, you know, you do

 a lot of things to feel 

that you are moving."

G: Beautiful women are invisible.
D: Invisible? What the hell does that mean? Invisible? They jump out at you. A beautiful woman, she stands out. She stands apart. You can't miss her.
G: But we never actually see the person. We see the beautiful shell. We're blocked by the beauty barrier. Yeah, we're so dazzled by the outside that we never make it inside.