Disgrace

JM Coetzee is a South African Nobel laureate novelist who now lives in Australia. Very fitting then that an adaptation of a book by him should be a collaboration between the two countries. John Malkovich stars as Prof David Lurie (early on, you easily want to call him Professor Lurid), a university lecturer of English Romanticism whose ‘master’ is poet William Wordsworth and who is also writing an opera based on poems by Lord Byron. All pretty high-brow stuff that only serves to widen the gulf between the world in his Eurocentric mind and the world around him.

Fascinated by female student Melanie (Antoinette Engel), who falls in front of him one rainy afternoon, he brusquely seduces her. Their increasingly tense rendezvous eventually lead to his forced resignation. Finding Cape Town increasingly hostile, he heads bush to stay on an achingly isolated but picturesque farm with his adult lesbian daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines), whose partner left.

This piece of land quickly becomes an emblem for an entire country’s post-apartheid power-politics turbulence. The narrative and symbolic engines of Disgrace are surely race-relations and justice (a complex organism of past, present and future). As should be clear from the language I’m being forced to use in describing it, this film is full-on and difficult viewing, especially running at just on two hours. It unflinchingly deals with heavy, multi-layered realities. The brutal and simple float over the complex bedrock which every honest post-colonial society must confront.

The filmmakers, Australian director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna Maria Monticelli (who co-worked on La Spagnola) surely had rich material and I commend their bravery. I personally found some of the imagery heavy-handed. Scenes and objects were dripping with earnest meaning in parts, and I found I wasn’t watching a naturalist film at all. It was more a highly stylised and ‘good for you’ morality play. For some people, there is nothing more rewarding; my personal tastes tend to be more nihilistic. But the keyword is personal.

The Blu-ray disc’s HD footage fairly handles the stunning scenery (which is yet another parallel with Australia) and the lush full sound of DTS Master audio surrounds you joyfully. Bonuses are confined to a 10 minute making of which is surprisingly superficial, given the feature’s depth.

Definitely a well-made and ‘worthy’ film about pain, justice, the past and the future, without the Hollywood uplift. Also, dog-lovers, consider yourselves forewarned: Prof Lurie volunteers in an animal shelter.

Felix Staica