Disgrace: 120 minutes. Rated: M. Director: Steve Jacobs. Starring: John Malkovich, Jessica Haines
Animal lovers will find Disgrace hard going. Dogs feature prominently, and suffer all manner of violence, both cruel and kind. Some are slaughtered senselessly by rogues. Others are euthanased with tenderness by those who see no better future for them.
Humanitarians will find it tough going, too. As in the J M Coetzee novel on which the film is based, the treatment of dogs stands as a kind of inbuilt, brutal fable reflecting the plight of human beings. Disgrace is a film about the shifting nature and misuse of power in post-apartheid South Africa. It paints a confronting picture.
The narrative circles around two occasions of physical assault. The first entails the abuse by a poetry professor, David Lurie (Malkovich), of one of his students (Antoinette Engel) at a Cape Town university.
David is an ageing, malevolent Lothario, all too aware that his position of authority does all the work that seduction would otherwise do — the misuse of power in sexual relationships need not entail physical force. Later, after the relationship is exposed, David appeals to the primacy of desire to justify the damage he has done to his victim.
The second assault takes place after David, disgraced and banished from the university, arrives at the remote farm where his daughter Lucy (Haines) lives and works as a market gardener. Here, in the wild lands of the eastern Cape, David experiences powerlessness: he and Lucy are badly beaten by a gang of black youths. Lucy is gang raped.
David draws a dubious moral distinction between this shocking act and his own misdeeds. He is indignant. The attack becomes a point of tension between him and his daughter. Lucy refuses to talk about it with him, or to take legal action against the perpetrators.
Disgrace portrays a society where power has shifted, and where the citizens have yet to adjust. Apartheid has ended, but racism has not. Equality is still a theory. The characters' world has changed, and while the more pragmatic Lucy struggles to accept and understand the change, David rages against it. He is angry and afraid.
It's a confronting film, but not preachy. It has an almost poetic quality, and ends on an uplifting note. The cinematographer's attention to the textures and colours of the South African landscapes suggests that there is beauty to be found in this story,