JM Coetzee's writing isn't to everyone's taste. Some of it might seem pointlessly dense and self-indulgent. But Disgrace is a widely-hailed masterpiece, and in this reviewer's opinion rightly so.
The problem in adapting it for the screen is that it's largely an allegory of post-apartheid South Africa and of white responses to it. It presents two very different such responses represented by the two main characters. On the one hand there's David, a professor who is caught having an affair with a mixed-race student, confesses everything without even being asked and willingly accepts his punishment and the end of his career. On the other, there's his daughter Lucy, who is gang-raped by a group of black men but who refuses to do anything about it other than bear the child which she conceives and indeed marry a relative of the rapist.
Of course, this is not how we'd expect real people or indeed convincing film characters to behave. But in the novel at least, that isn't the point. David represents a point of view which sees formal justice as everything. Guilty people (himself included) should accept their punishment and move on. By extension, the abolition of formal apartheid is all that is needed to remove any sense of race-based disadvantage or special pleading. Whites have given up power and non-whites (on this view) need to accept that and expect no more than formal equal treatment.
Lucy, on the other hand, represents the exact opposite position. Formal justice has no meaning - there is no such thing as crime and victims (herself included) take no comfort from the punishment of criminals. Again, the analogy is that abolishing the formal features of apartheid solves nothing - racial injustice and its consequences will always remain. Accordingly, whites need to accept that and the desire for revenge that comes with.
Neither character is attractive in the novel, and neither point of view is optimistic. I suspect that's exactly what Coetzee intended, challenging the reader to come up with some alternative between two bleak and diametrically-opposed alternatives.
The trouble is that allegory doesn't work well on screen. In the film - indeed in any film - there's less left to your imagination than in a novel. Many who've seen the film but not read the book are seemingly left bemused about why a rape victim passively accepts her situation, or why a tenured professor doesn't try to save his career. The symbolism and allegory of a novel, particularly a complex and challenging novel like Disgrace, just doesn't register. The film's strict adherence to the book, including much dialogue which is used verbatim, doesn't help this.
In other words, both the main characters are caricatures, intended to represent opposing wider beliefs or viewpoints. That's fine in a novel, but when a film-maker gives them an immediacy - faces, voices and surroundings - it becomes harder to see them as anything other than 'real'. What was meant to be absurd but illuminating risks becoming simply unbelievable.
Nonetheless, it has its moments. Both leads do well to give their characters at least some credibility, especially Jessica Haines as the self-willed but ultimately passive Lucy. The affair between John Malkovich and his student is given a strongly and appropriately sordid flavour. Eriq Ebouaney brings just the right balance of awkward bonhomie and hidden menace to Petrus. And the attack on the farm has a power which no novel can capture.
Overall, a decent effort at filming what is probably and ultimately unfilmable. Read the book first and you might like it more.
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