"Old age sneaks up on you," 60-something literature professor David Kepesh muses, "and the next thing you know you're asking yourself what I'm asking myself: why can't an old man act his real age?"

"How is it possible for me still to be involved in the carnal aspects of the human comedy, because, in my head, nothing has changed?"

And that, dear reader, is what 'Elegy' aims to answer. It doesn't. Despite all the makings of a pretentious art film ? heavily symbolic visuals of dying plants or a squash ball rolling across an empty court; weighty literary origins; addressing the Big Themes; overwrought dialogue ("beautiful women are invisible"); and self-important voiceovers ? Isabel Coixet's film amounts to little more than a laboured inter-generational love story.

Ben Kingsley is Kepesh, a serial womaniser, who falls for one of his students Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz). But unlike his other typically fleeting and superficial encounters, this liaison develops into a full-blown love affair. And as the seemingly independent intellectual finds himself in unfamiliar territory, possessiveness, jealousy and insecurities about his age threaten to wreck the relationship.

This provides plenty of opportunity for Kingsley and Dennis Hopper (playing his poet friend) to ruminate on the rules of attraction ? and sex ? while sitting at a deli or playing squash, but they seem more like two college students solving the world's problems over a beer. There's also time for Kingsley to play the ineffectual parent to a needy son (a snivelling Peter Sarsgaard) and engage in evasive pillow-talk with resident part-time lover Patricia Clarkson.

But mostly he gets to make out with Cruz and obsess over her breasts, which plays out as uncomfortably and stilted as the rest of Coixet's botched take on Philip Roth's 'The Dying Animal'.

"Nothing pure is ever simple," claims the tagline. It should probably read: "Nothing simple is ever pure."