Egotastic has a couple of artfully lit but not particularly safe for work clips from Elegy, which feature a naked Penelope Cruz in bed with Ben Kingsley. I don’t know much about this film––it premiered at Berlinale, where Jurgen Fauth described how Cruz’s “breasts even become a plot point”––but surely, this is the most pre-release attention ever given to anything directed by Isabel Coixet, and that’s probably ultimately a good thing. Still, it points to an alarming trend of indie/art films which position the 65 year-old Kingsley as a sex symbol to much, much younger women. If it takes three examples to make a trend, we can easily find the other two in Kingsley’s next film to hit the American marketplace, Sundance crowd pleaser The Wackness.
The 31-year age difference between Kingsley and Cruz makes their coupling only slightly less convincing than the actor’s love-at-first-sight meet-cute with a character played by Jane Adams in The Wackness. Adams is 43, but in Jonathan Levine’s film, she looks and acts younger. The “just add pot” instant chemistry between these two “loveable losers” is one of the more repellent indie film cliches in a film replete with them (I’ll save my commentary on the other cliches for my review, which we’ll post later this week around the time of The Wackness‘ premiere at Tribeca).
Much has been made of Kingsley’s make-out scene with 21-year old Mary-Kate Olsen in The Wackness, but at least the film seems to be playing that as obviously ridiculous (although, with The Wackness, you never know––the film’s internal Ridiculous-o-meter is pretty unreliable). But the film clearly wants us to take the Adams/Kingsley romance seriously, which makes it way more disturbing that the couple of shots of Kingsley slobbering on, to paraphrase Lindsay Lohan, a piece of “Full House ass.”
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth