|
|
Disgrace is the story of
a South
African professor of English who loses
everything: his reputation, his job, his peace of mind, his good looks,
his dreams of artistic success, and finally even his ability to protect
his own daughter.
Based on Nobel
Prize winner J.M. Coetzee’s novel,
this film tells the story of David Lurie, twice-divorced and
dissatisfied with his job as a Communications professor, teaching one
specialized class in Romantic literature at a technical university in
Cape Town in post-apartheid South Africa. His "disgrace" comes when he
seduces one of his students and he does nothing to protect himself from
its consequences. Lurie was working on Lord Byron at the time of his
disgrace, and "the irony is that he comes to grief from an escapade
that Byron would have thought distinctly timid." He is dismissed from
his teaching position, after which he takes refuge on his daughter's
farm in the Eastern Cape. For a time, his daughter's influence and
natural rhythms of the farm promise to harmonise his discordant life.
But soon they are brought back to a harsh reality.
Disgrace
demands critical and involved viewing/reading. According to The
Guardian, "any novel set in post-apartheid South Africa is fated to be
read as a political portrait, but the fascination of Disgrace is the
way it both encourages and contests such a reading by holding extreme
alternatives in tension, salvation, ruin." The novel takes its
inspiration from South Africa's contemporary social and political
conflict, and offers a bleak look at the country.
|
|
