Disgrace

Written by Paul Satterthwaite Saturday, 06 February 2010 19:40

Director: Steve Jacobs

Filmhouse: Saturday 6th February - Thursday 11th February

In a time when too many screen adaptations of prize winning novels stray so far from the original text and intention of the novelist that they become unrecognisable from their original source and indeed go so far as to produce a wholly different, more audience friendly ending, Steve Jacobs can at least be applauded for his faithful screen adaptation of JM Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize winning examination of post-apartheid South Africa.

Unfortunately it is here that any applause must quickly fade, as Jacobs serves up to us a film with more unsympathetic characters, bizarre personal representations and clumsy political allusions than any movie should ever have the right to ask an audience to endure.

Malkovich’s poetry lecturer and professor, despite the script trying to tell us on countless occasions otherwise, is a soulless and passionless creature. The ‘immoral’ affair with a young female student, who seems as wet as the rain she is seemingly forever avoiding, that brings about his downfall highlights more than anything the mechanical emotionally detached nature of his character.

Clumsy attempts by the script to draw comparisons with the ‘beast driven by personal desire’ in the works of Byron that Malkovich is presenting to his class and the character of Professor Lurie himself are quite honestly laughable as we are presented with a man many leagues removed from a ‘devil may care’ wild and uncontrollable animal. Whether this stunted representation of Professor Lurie is a result of Malkovich’s ever increasing battle with South African verb sounds, or the real intention of the director and actor it’s hard to conclude, but the result leaves us as unemotionally affected by the character as he himself seems to be with the world and those around him.

Things don’t really improve when Lurie, finds himself in self exile on his daughter’s rural smallholding, following his expulsion from his position at the university. If possible in Lucy, his daughter, we find an even more unsympathetic and infuriating individual than her father. The horror that befalls Lucy seems to leave her so detached from life and her own fate that you quickly lose any deserved sympathy and basically give up caring about what happens to either the pathetically accepting women or her father. Her description in particular of her own rape as a white women being a “collection of something owed” and defending her black rapists as being mere “debt collectors” is tedious and unrealistic.

Even after Lurie has finally shown some much overdue emotion and anger at the rape of his daughter and her choice and determination to pursue a life of reconciliation in the country’s emerging social order, this quickly disappears as he returns to the cold unfeeling and acceptance of all around him. In fact throughout the whole film every character seems to display an attitude to the incidents and changes around them that bypass passive acceptance and head straight into the realms of that of uncaring somnambulant.

Throughout the duration of the isolated farm scenes, the director didn’t miss a single opportunity to deliver many verbal and visual allusions to the political nature of post-apartheid South Africa that they are easily lost in a sea of political allegories, their frequency and clumsiness detracting from any impact the insights were intended to have.

In a final crushing indictment, the film ends with the central characters deciding to go inside to have a cup of tea. This final verbal exchange highlights wonderfully the apparent lack of desire and interest to all around them that will also leave an audience unconcerned about their plight and situation, and ultimately almost completely indifferent to any insight the film hopes to offer on the state of post-apartheid South Africa.

2/5

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