DISGRACE
This spare and superbly photographed film set in post-Apartheid South Africa, based on the Booker prize winning bestseller, Disgrace, by South-African native and Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee is a near perfect adaptation. It is a complex and extremely challenging allegory that puts us in the discomfiting position of identifying with villains of many shades.
The immoral center of the story is David Lurie (John Malkovich), the type of academic intellectual whose value has always been questionable. When he is lucky he gets to teach romantic poetry, but most of the time he has to resign himself to the drudgery of teaching generic communications courses to mostly uninspired students. Lurie fancies himself a romantic and seducer in the mold of Byron, and in that sense he likes to move easily from one unencumbered romantic encounter to another. But the years have been cruel as they always are: easy pickups have disappeared leaving him dependent upon the services of a gorgeous call girl named Soraya. When Soraya abruptly drops him, Lurie, turns his attention to one of his students. It is significant that both of these woman are mixed race because the action is all taking place in Cape Town, in post-apartheid South Africa. Lurie’s predatory obsession leads him to imagine a consensual sexual relationship, that is until she reports him to the university administration.
The film then shifts to the rural Eastern Cape where Lurie’s daughter Lucy has been attempting to live a rural ideal: growing and selling flowers and boarding dogs on a farm her father helped her buy. She had been part of a group but is now alone, helped out by a neighbor, Petreus, an industrious black man who is quickly accumulating the land around Lucy’s plot. When David shows up, disgraced yet not quite humbled, the events that follow test him further.
Apparently this book caused as much outrage as it garnered awards and praise and it’s clear why. Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president and Coetzee got into a spat over the book and it’s portrayal of blacks, in particular, yet in fact no one escapes unsullied. There is no comforting denouement - the world in South Africa has changed, the chickens have come home to roost and that means for casually privileged and entitled characters like David, the sort who had just enough power to mess up lives yet not enough to still be in charge, quickly find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances. Coetzee, who himself commented upon the increasing corporatization of knowledge and art, makes it clear how displaced a character like Lurie is in the new hyper-capitalist, post-Apartheid world that has still left millions of Black South Africans with no real change in circumstances.
Ultimately, for David Lurie there is no magical transformation or redemption. Liberation does not guarantee that humans will not continue to live their selfish, reactionary lives.
Disgrace opens September 25, 2009
Directed by Steve Jacobs; written by Anna-Maria Monticelli based on the novel by J.M. Coetzee; produced by Anna-Maria Monticelli, Emile Sherman, and Steve Jacobs; Director of Photography, Steve Arnold; edited by Alexandre D Franceschi; music by Antony Partos and Graeme Koehne. Released by Paladin. Running time: 120 minutes.
With: John Malkovich (David Lurie); Jessica Haines (Lucy); Eriq Ebouaney (Petrus); Fiona Press (Bev Shaw); Antoinette Engel (Melanie Isaacs); David Dennis (Mr. Isaacs) and Charles Tertiens (Ryan.)
