Disgrace

Photo / Supplied

Rating

: * * * *

Verdict

:

Bleak and brilliant.

The always-watchable Malkovich adds to his gallery of creepy, tantalisingly opaque characters in this faithful adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel. There's little to fault in the result but for all the skill on show, it fails to match the achievement of the original.

Perhaps it never could have. Coetzee's novel, set in post-apartheid South Africa, is a bleak meditation on the impossibility of rising above our basest nature in a world made toxic by oppression. It's a potent allegory which, even when the blood of a thriller pounds in its veins, resists a simply literal reading and assumes the gravitas of high art.

But, deprived of a novel's internal dialogue, and having to contain its ideas in gesture and action, a film version was always going to have trouble digging beneath the story's surface of events.

This is not to say that it is ever less than mesmerisingly engrossing. Malkovich plays David Lurie, a professor of romantic poetry whose conceited manner cannot disguise his curdled self-loathing. He's a sensualist who sees himself as an incarnation of Byron - he is writing an opera about the poet - but behind the studied ennui lurks a monstrously self-absorbed narcissist.

His seduction of a (tellingly dark-skinned) student, Melanie (Engel) is driven by a curious mixture of profound cynicism and a professional death wish, but the strongest reason for it seems to be that he can. Certainly, when his actions catch up with him, he scorns the disciplinary process, pleading guilty to charges that he never hears and offering no explanation; instead, he goes to stay at the remote farm of his lesbian daughter Lucy (Haines).

The rural idyll that she has created seems at first to embody the hope of a new South Africa, but when a shocking and brutal event erupts into the lives of the pair, nothing is as it was. Lurie, the father who brutalised another man's daughter in Melanie, is unable to protect his own. Worse, he cannot understand that it's not what happened but what happens next that is important.

That's the challenge for us, too: the screenplay by Anna Maria Monticelli is ruthlessly faithful to Coetzee in spurning the comforting pieties of a redemptive narrative arc and the film shows no fear of the many ambiguities raised by its story.

Yet that virtue is, oddly, a fault. The characters seem to move away from us in the final half hour, to become actors, even enactors, rather than people. In one sense, this aloofness is apt, because it's plausible that they would withdraw into their shells. But it makes for a disengaged experience and stops a good movie from being a great one.

Peter Calder

Cast

: John Malkovich, Jessica Haines, Antoinette Engel

Director

: Steve Jacobs

Running time

: 120 mins

Rating

: M (contains violence, offensive language and sex scenes)