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Disgrace: a father and daughter divided by guilt
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It could almost be called “irony”: right after Professor David Lurie has an affair with a student half his age, his daughter is raped. But Disgrace, beautifully adapted (by Anna Maria Monticelli) from J.M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name, is ultimately about much more than sexual indiscretion and resulting shame.
With his second film, director Steve Jacobs proves to be on par with another talented Australian, Ray Lawrence (whose under-seen Jindabyne featured a similar caste system, albeit on a smaller scale.) Set in South Africa on the heels of the apartheid, Disgrace starts in Capetown. David Lurie, played by John Malkovich in one of his best performances, teaches at the local university and is the sort of professor more interested in pompous speeches than interacting with his students - except when he’s having an affair with one of them. His newest fling, Melanie (Antoinette Engel) happens to be black, and seems to be submitting to sex out of a sense of duty. Then she begins to rebuke his advances and he doesn’t back away. A brawny boyfriend comes into the picture.
Soon the school is trying David before his peers and press are snapping pictures of him while he maintains that yes, he knows what he did was wrong, and no, he isn’t sorry. Forced to retire, he drives to the countryside where his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines) lives with a bunch of dogs and works with an eager and friendly black man, Petrus (the excellent Eriq Ebouaney).
Lucy is her father’s opposite. She doesn’t need constant companionship – her female lover recently left her, and when David worries about her living all alone she blows off his concerns. She has a strong sense of morals, but she’s not overly judging of her father. Her best friends are a homely couple who run an animal shelter with a grisly but necessary practice of putting down dogs (David becomes particularly attached to one). When, in a scene that jars the movie out of its engaging portrait of rural life vis-a-vis a father and daughter reacquainting, three teenaged intruders kill Lucy’s dogs, rape Lucy, and very nearly burn David alive, she insists on staying in South Africa even though her mother’s safe home in Europe seems an easy option.
There are easy metaphors that could be made of this. Though it takes David an hour and a half of screen time to admit it, his predatory relationship with Melanie could be construed as rape. Is this payback? Without giving too much away, I will say that the movie veers away from this and spends most of the second half exposing the impossible system of guilt and corruption Lucy has linked herself to, one in which neighbors cheerfully harbor the enemy and swallowing fear, pride, and common sense is preferable to giving up the ultimate goal of peace. In this sense, Lucy is the most frustrating, heartbreaking heroine since Million Dollar Baby’s Maggie Fitzgerald, and Haines, a South African newcomer, makes one of the memorable debuts of the year.
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