Disgrace, Steve Jacobs, Australia, 2009
Alice TynanScratch the surface of the 'new' South Africa and you'll find a painful patchwork of old wounds. Steve Jacobs' adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace fearlessly pares back the layers of post-Apartheid South Africa within the microcosm of a father/daughter relationship.
David Lurie (John Malkovich) is a jaded university English professor, cast into disrepute after an aggressive affair with one of his students. His stunning lack of remorse is matched only by glimpses of self-loathing. "A thing. Not possible to love and condemned to solitude," he pointedly describes in one lecture. Seemingly content to crucify his career, David leaves Cape Town to visit his daughter in the rural regions of Eastern Cape. Immediately concerned about Lucy's (Jessica Haines) vulnerability living on the farm alone, his fears are soon realised when the pair are brutally attacked and the farm ransacked.
This film is not easy going. Jacobs and his cast unflinchingly bring the harsh realities of Coetzee's story to life. Malkovich -- who always tends to play Malkovich -- here softens his trademark clipped diction with a South African accent and embodies David with a wretched and compelling conviction. Haines, in her feature debut, holds her ground with Malkovich. She portrays Lucy with a steely resolve: the devastating inheritance stemming from her father's dogged narcissism.
While both actors shoulder the weighty subject matter, cinematographer Steve Arnold both underscores and contrasts the tone of the film with stark, beautiful images. The craggy mountains that surround Lucy's farm are an omnipresent reminder of how penned in she's allowed herself to become. The landscape is at times lush and bountiful, and at others barren and hostile. Arnold captures it all with a skilful and cinematic eye.
Jacobs' wife, writer-producer Anna-Maria Monticelli, had the intimidating task of adapting Coetzee's work, and the source material is evident at times in the episodic nature of some scenes. But where she, and the entire production team do succeed, is in translating the density and sophistication of the work, particularly in the thematic comparisons between human and animal.
Celebrated academic Benedict Anderson described a nation as "an imagined community", existing only as a shared idea in the minds of its inhabitants. For a population still reeling from a tumultuous and devastating history, a united South Africa must seem at times impossible to imagine. "It's finished now," Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), the black co-owner of Lucy's farm repeats to David. But acceptance does not come so easily for those mired in disgrace.