DVDs in Review

Disgrace

Title: Disgrace (2008)

Release date: February 8 2009

Certificate: 15

Format:DVD

DVD RRP: £12.99

Rating:4/5

'Disgrace' is a good title for a film whose central character is unlikable and indeed disgraceful. John Malkovich brings intense sexual tension as David Lurie, a shamed poetry professor in Cape Town who scandalously entices one of his students. Thrown out of the university, he moves to the Eastern Cape to be with his daughter and lie low from the scandal while trying to understand his own urges.

What he finds in the secluded ranch and the small town is another level of sexual subversion and instinctual feelings that he must deal with before they consume him and his daughter. It's only when a rape of the daughter and an assault on himself happens that the wheels begin to turn, but it's uncertain whether he can possibly be redeemed. Even his regular prostitute has let him go by the start of the film.

'Disgrace' is a tough piece of work - a slow film with unattractive characters, un-erotic sex and awkward scene set-ups. It's a queasy film that seems to sway in the immense heat of Africa, evaporating all pretence and slowly baking something you won't want to swallow when it's done.

Malkovich frequently plays powerful intellects who are shunned by society for being radical. It's easy to say that he's playing the same old character once again, but 'Disgrace' is the subtlest work he's done since 'Dangerous Liaisons'. Much of this is owed to JM Coetzee's devastatingly raw source novel.

The film itself comes off as a cross between 'Elegy' (based on similar author Philip Roth's own sex-fuelled, soulless professor in limbo plot) and 'The Night of the Iguana' (the Tennessee Williams melodrama that saw Richard Burton turn in a great performance as a boozy womaniser looking for direction, fighting animal instinct).  

If read on the surface, 'Disgrace' is almost impenetrable and uninviting. A little deeper reveals characters that may seem to be expressing their thoughts very bluntly but it's just a front for something more psychologically daunting.

Every character in 'Disgrace' is missing something and swayed by another's influence, put to work like animals and aligned as if on a food chain. Indeed, the constant comparisons to dogs are masterstrokes of story development, bringing into question loyalty, instinct, hunger, desire, pack hunting, friendship, impulsive sex and mortality. This is unflinching, yet darkly rewarding stuff.