Disgrace
Based on JM Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace is set in a post-apartheid South Africa that's renegotiating privilege and power. With a striking juxtaposition of brutally beautiful landscapes and plush, paranoid cities, it's the perfect backdrop for a provocative meditation on race, class, sex and violence.
When poetry professor David Lurie (John Malkovich) is kicked out of his university for a callous affair with a student (Antoinette Engel), he retreats to his grown-up daughter Lucy's remote farm. Lucy's market garden business relies on the protection and financial assistance of black farmhand Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), and when father and daughter are brutally attacked by black youths, Lurie's racist anger at Petrus threatens to destroy Lucy's precarious existence.
The film resists the temptation to paint Lurie as a sympathetic figure. He's a self-absorbed aesthete and sexual predator with no compunction or social skills, which highlights the hypocrisy of his outrage. Still, the perfectly cast Malkovich makes Lurie intriguing. Newcomer Jessica Haines is fantastic as Lucy. The decisions she makes aren't easy to understand and feel like capitulations, but Haines's toughness suggests Lucy will weather life's storms far better than her father.
By Mel Campbell
Format: Cinema
Genre: Drama
Keywords: Film, South Africa
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