By Iain Blair

Movies have been around for a century or so now, and for most of that time, women directors were MIA. Times have changed in the last few decades, but women directors are still an endangered species. So hopefully audiences will appreciate the lyrical and sexy new film Elegy from Spanish director Isabel Coixet, who started making films when she received an 8mm camera for her first communion, and whose international breakthrough came in 2003 with the intimate drama My Life Without Me.

Elegy is another drama, that this time charts the passionate relationship between a celebrated college professor (Ben Kingsley) and a young woman (Penélope Cruz) whose beauty turns his life upside down. The film is beautifully shot, and Coixet is nothing if not a very hands-on director – she operates her own camera (with longtime collaborator Jean-Claude Larrieu as Director of Photography), and the result is a provocative study of human nature that’s well worth catching.
 

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