John Malkovich and Jessica Haines in Disgrace.
Disgrace
The 100 best novels / No 99 / Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)
Philip French
Sunday 6 December 2006
T
his decent, extremely faithful adaptation of Nobel laureate JM Coetzee's 1999 Booker-winning novel is the work of an Australian team led by director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna Maria Monticelli. John Malkovich stars as the arrogant 52-year-old David Lurie, a lecturer in English literature at a Cape Town university, who loses his job after refusing to apologise sufficiently for an affair with a coloured student and then joins his lesbian daughter at a remote farm where she is raped by three young marauding black men. The contrasted ways father and daughter react to this terrible act define their responses to a radical social change.
Disgrace is both a compelling human fable and a complex, ambiguous allegory of post-apartheid South Africa, raising issues about white guilt, black vengeance, the shift in political power and the problems occasioned by the country's deeply divided past and problematically shared future. Malkovich invariably plays men apart and is here well cast as a fastidious intellectual, a Byronic authority on Byron, standing aloof equally from the unjust society in which he was raised and the new one in which he uncomfortably finds himself. His oddly strangulated accent contributes to a sense of alienation, though one doubts if this was the intention. This chilly film gets surprisingly close to the tone of Coetzee's precise prose.