There’s a haunting quality about Steve Jacobs’s film ‘Disgrace’, adapted from J.M. Coetzee’s best selling novel, that is impossible to shake off.
‘Disgrace’ charts a very unusual father and daughter relationship. John Malkovich plays David Lurie, a professor at a Cape Town technical university, who is forced to resign after it is discovered that he has been having an affair with one of his students. Professor Lurie seeks solace by going to spend time with his daughter Lucy, played by Jessica Haines, on her isolated farm in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Lucy’s farm, however, does not turn out to be much of a retreat for the Professor, as he soon realises, and has to contend with, the many dramas that Lucy has to face on her property.
Jacobs’s film vividly portrays the harshness of life in modern day post-apartheid South Africa. For father and daughter, it is a bitter struggle to survive. They,their farm, and their animals, are viciously attacked by a group of three black youths in the films’ most terrifying and grim scene. Their lives are lived out in a constant state of dread and uncertainty.
Professor Lurie forms a friendship with the township’s local vet, Bev, and ends up helping her in her surgery. The audience witnesses them having to put to sleep many of the animals to sleep because of the poverty and the poor health standards.
What makes Coetzee’s book, and the film that has been made from it, is the temerity and courage with which Lucy, in particular, faces the challenges in her life. For Lucy, this is her farm, this is her life, and she is not going to be swayed by any one. Her father, reluctant at first to see his daughter take such a difficult ‘road’, learns to accept and respect her.
With an understated yet powerful performance by Jessica Haines, Lucy makes an unusual yet very compelling heroine.
