This review of Steve Jacobs’ cinematic adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace appeared in the December-January edition of the Literary Review.
CRIMES OF THE PAST
Disgrace
Dir Steve Jacobs
(120 mins Australia/South Africa 2008)
J M Coetzee’s 1999 Booker Prize-winning novel takes its title from not one, but two instances of disgrace. In the first, David Lurie, a 52-year-old ‘adjunct professor of communications’ at a university in Cape Town (before the ‘great rationalization’ of higher education that followed the end of apartheid, he’d been a professor of modern languages), is sacked and his pension taken away after it emerges that he has slept with a female student. In the second, Lurie’s daughter Lucy is raped by three black men who break into her ramshackle clapboard house in the Eastern Cape, to which Lurie himself has retreated following his sacking. The rapists douse Lurie in methylated spirits and he suffers disfiguring burns.
Lurie’s atonement for his disgrace takes the form of a kind of self-abasement: he volunteers at a clinic run by Lucy’s friend Bev Shaw, helping to end the lives of abandoned and unwanted dogs. And, as if to announce a definitive end to his career as a sexual ‘adventurer’ (he is a veteran of two marriages and hundreds of casual liaisons), he also sleeps with Bev, a plain, dumpy woman to whom he isn’t remotely attracted.
Lucy, meanwhile, has no sins to atone for – at least, no sins that are solely hers. Yet she chooses, as her father puts it, to try to ‘expiate the crimes of the past’ – those of white South Africa, in other words – by ‘suffering in the present’. She refuses to report the rape to the police, and instead seeks the protection of a black man named Petrus, who had previously worked for her, but to whom she now resolves to sign over her land in return for security against the intruders (one of whom, a disturbed boy named Pollux, turns out to be related to Petrus). This, Lurie says, is a ‘humiliation’, but it is one his daughter is prepared to accept. It will mean living ‘like a dog’, he objects. ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘like a dog.’
This is a pivotal exchange in the novel. And it is central to Steve Jacobs’s cinematic adaptation of Disgrace as well. Like Coetzee’s book, the film is structured around Lurie’s humiliation and Lucy’s rape. Lurie’s appearance before a university tribunal, following a sexual harassment complaint from his ‘coloured’ student lover Melanie Isaacs, is played, in both novel and film, as a kind of Stalinist show trial. But where, in the book, Lurie meets his accusers with a cold defiance, and an austere, nearly analytical defence of his ‘serv[ice] of Eros’, in Jacobs’s film, John Malkovich turns defiance into foppish disdain, playing the disgraced professor as a kind of lisping, smirking Casanova (which, incidentally, is how he is described in an anonymous note that is shoved under his office door, warning him that his ‘days are over’).
Indeed, it’s as if Malkovich approached the part as a reprise of his role as the arch-seducer the Vicomte de Valmont, in Stephen Frears’s 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons. He turns what the narrator in the novel calls the ‘light’ and intermittent ‘shudder of voluptuousness’ into a sort of permanent, low-level priapic charge, and the result is nothing so much as a form of debilitating camp or kitsch. And that’s part of the problem with Jacobs’s version of Disgrace, which is based on a screenplay by Anna-Maria Monticelli: it breaks the connection established in the book between Lurie’s disgrace and Lucy’s.
When depicting the encounter between Lurie and his young lover, Coetzee takes care to show Melanie completely still, frozen almost, as the older man toils above her, as if to suggest that his latest conquest (the word is apt) is almost a rape, and one for which his daughter’s later violation will be awful revenge. Coetzee wants the reader to see South African history as something ineluctable that neither father nor daughter can escape (indeed, Disgrace is a distinctively and grimly deterministic novel). But this context is fatally attenuated in the film: Lurie’s dalliance and eventual defenestration from the university seem like a giant non sequitur or MacGuffin, a mere erotic psychodrama whose wider significance is smoothed away.
But the biggest difficulty that Jacobs and Monticelli face is that Disgrace is not a straightforwardly realist novel, and so won’t yield many of its treasures to the screen. It operates, as Coetzee once said of his own practice as a novelist, ‘in terms of its own procedures’. It is preoccupied, in other words, with its own linguistic textures – these themselves becoming one of the novel’s principal themes. And telling the story from Lurie’s point of view is essential to this. We view his relationship with Petrus through the lens of his scepticism about the ability of the English language to tell the truth of South African history. ‘Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mould of English, Petrus’s story would come out arthritic, bygone.’ But without Lurie’s preoccupation with this withering of the tongue, all one is left with is the story of a satyr or sexual freebooter exiled from the city and condemned to a life on the unforgiving high veld. And it’s not enough.