An elegy to epic lovers

Elegy ruined Saturday night. Not that it's not a good film. It's the film's depiction of a certain kind of men that hurt. The kind Milan Kundera classifies as epic lovers.

An elegy to epic lovers

Elegy ruined Saturday night. Not that it's not a good film. It's the film's depiction of a certain kind of men that hurt. The kind Milan Kundera classifies as epic lovers.

Kundera says the world has two types of men: the epic lovers and the lyrical lovers. There's also a third kind, the one-woman ones, but let's keep them out of this column.

According to Kundera, the lyrical lover believes there's this one woman made especially for him and he moves from woman to woman in search of that ideal mate.

He feels there are many kinds of women in this world and like an epic hero he wants to explore them all. No ideal woman for him, he's the Ulysses looking for new conquests.

u00a0My vote has always gone to the epic lover. Till I saw Elegy. Sir Ben Kingsley (the guy who played Gandhi) is David Kapash in the film.

This aging professor of literature discusses critical theory, does a TV show and beds women half his age. He's been married before, realised it was a terrible mistake and become a serial dater.

This state of "emancipated manhood" is threatened when he mates Consuela Castillo (Penelope Cruz).

Castillo's youth makes him conscious of his age. Her charm makes him possessive. Her vivacity makes him recoil. He degenerates into a dying animal.

Elegy is a slap in the face of men who refuses to give in to political correctness. Those eternal charmers who never grow tired of love and never quite settle down.

That used to be fashionable, but not any more. The fine art of womanizing has been consigned to the trash bin of pre-post feminist history. And the bad boys have all turned wimps.

u00a0Look around you. Mick Jagger, post knighthood, has stopped chasing women younger than his daughter.

Eric Clapton is talking only about his old songs and Richard Gere is morphing into the Buddha. Even Hugh Hefner isn't changing his bunnies that frequently.

Back home, Feroz Khan just died and his son is happily flaunting his taken status. Khan's old friend Vinod Khanna isn't also looking around much these days.
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Even Akshay Kumar is getting his wife, of all the women in the world, to unzip him.

As Elegy got over and I sat with a sullen face, the wife turned to me with one of those steely glances she has perfected since marriage. "Men like that die lonely deaths," she said. Life's tough.

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