Disgrace

Synopsis: When Cape Town academic David Lurie (John Malkovich) loses his professorship after an affair with a student he decides to visit his estranged daughter (Jessica Haines) who lives on an isolated farmlet in the rugged South African countryside.

Disgrace is a relatively unusual film in that it is both quite narratively-driven and profoundly reflective. No doubt the successful combination of the two qualities owes much to J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel on which it is based but the fine direction and scripting by, respectively, Steve Jacobs and Anna-Maria Monticelli, married producers whose previous film was the charming 2001 comedy, La Spagnola, deserve recognition.

At heart the film is concerned with the male sexual urge. Both in terms of plot and dialogue the film tries to understand the rampant male libido, its place within the social order and its consequences for women. At once procreative and destructive, amorous and violent the male libido is, to say the least, problematic and no-one is more aware of this than Professor David Lurie. Lurie is however not just a predatory male. He is a cultured intellectual who understands his drives in terms of Romantic philosophy and in particular through Byron‘s poeticisation of the male libido as “the mad heart”. He cites William Blake’s Neitzschean dictum that “it is better to murder a child in its cradle than nurse an unacted desire” and in an exchange with his daughter suggests that it is society’s attempt to repress the male sexual urge that is the problem, not the urge itself which is, rather, essential to the condition of maleness.

As played by Malkovich whose characteristically phlegmatic arrogance is well-suited to the part, Lurie is, to use Byronic terminology, “a monster”, that is, a dark, even Satanic, force. Unlike Ben Kingsley’s David Kepesh, the philandering Professor of Literature in the recently-released Elegy (2008), Lurie is not a man readily given to remorse and self-mortification. Rather, he has an adamantine contempt for society’s punitive norms and strictures and when he is effectively dismissed from his comfortable academic niche he accepts the ostracism as his given due and sheds no tears.

This profound self-absorption is shattered when Lure visits his daughter at her remote Eastern Cape farm. He comes into contact with a world and scales of values which do not conform with his finely-honed perspective and which, as a result of a savage attack on his daughter and himself, is literally broken by the confrontation. Out of the experience however comes a very different man. What is so effective about Disgrace is the subtlety and complexity with which this transformation is handled. There is no simple progression to redemption for Lurie, but rather a painful, halting process of adjustment and re-constitution.

Malkovich, who has more than his fair share of rubbish on his CV, should be pleased with his work here and South African actress Jessica Haines is excellent as his very different but equally strong-willed daughter. Steve Arnold not only directed but also provides excellent services as the film’s cinematographer, the rugged South African locations being beautifully lensed by him. There were moments, such as Lucy’s bath-robe falling open, that are a little over-stated but in sum Disgrace is a fine film for an adult audience.

Want more about this film?

Want something different?