A screen adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize winner, Disgrace could easily have gone horribly wrong.
Fortunately, creative partners, Australians Steve Jacobs and Anna-Maria Monticelli have delivered a finely nuanced film that closely reflects the intelligence and subtlety of the novel.
John Malkovich gives a suitably malevolent turn as somewhat dissolute literature professor David Lurie whose philanderings eventually catch up with him.
Dismissed from his Cape Town university post, he goes up country to see his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines in a beautiful performance), who makes her living growing fruit and flowers, which she sells in the local town market. Despite initial scepticism, David begins to acclimatise to country life but it is only when he and Lucy become the victims of a savage attack that he begins to reconsider his own behaviour. And so begins a journey towards attrition and forgiveness. Disgrace is as much the story of South Africa and its disturbing history as it is of David and Lucy. It is as searing in its observations of the troubled complexities of that nation, as it is of sexual exploitation, hypocrisy and the dynamics of family.
Pauline Webber is a Sydney-based writer and reviewer
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