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Not So Black and White

Adapted from Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name, "Disgrace" depicts the shifting balance of power, and powerlessness, in post-apartheid South Africa. Director Steve Jacobs and screenwriter Anna Maria Monticelli ("La Spagnola") effectively distill Coetzee's novel without compromising its complexity.

Professor of British Romanticism David Lurie (John Malkovich) is a self-styled Byronic hero with "a mad heart." Perhaps no one other than John Malkovich is as suited for this Luciferian role, with his devastatingly soft-spoken and disturbed charisma. David sees himself as a light-giving, and stealing, monstrous angel of the misunderstood who wears his Hell on his sleeve. Teaching in Cape Town to racially diverse but harmoniously bored students, his lectures are delivered with both passion (for the material) and contempt (for the classroom).

David has a brief but life-altering affair with a student, Melanie (Antoinette Engel). The relationship, such as it is, is one-sided, with the power (and pleasure) much in his favor. Age differences and student/teacher dynamics aside, he is white and she is black, and there are to be consequences for his actions once the scandal breaks. He pridefully accepts his punishment without apology.

David's daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines) maintains a farm and flower garden in the Eastern Cape where he now finds himself. She lives the romantic life that her father can only experience in books, and her patch of barely tamed land amid a largely untouched countryside is the opposite of his Ivory Tower amid the happy hunting grounds of Academia.

Living on the land adjoining Lucy is Petrus (Eric Ebouaney), a black farmhand who is warmly allowed by Lucy to enter the house as he pleases. Petrus offers, and asks for, help as needed, and is warily viewed with suspicion by David. When Lucy suggests that David assist Petrus on his land, David is momentarily stunned by the perceived role-reversal before dryly saying: "I like its historical...piquancy." A darker side of social role-reversals is shortly and tragically revealed, as David and Lucy become the victims of an ugly crime. This leads to reexaminations of attitudes on every side that are anything but academic.

In a sense, South Africa has gone to the dogs, as canines figure prominently in "Disgrace," both literally and metaphorically. David finds work at a volunteer animal clinic, run by Lucy's friend Bev (Fiona Press). Lucy herself keeps a kennel of dogs on her property. "Like a dog," David says to Lucy, when she explains her end of a proposed business deal with Petrus. "Yes, like a dog," she replies. Anyone who is a "dog person" should be warned of the routine euthanasia and other uncomfortable dog scenes in the film.

Those hoping for an easy answer to racism, systemic or otherwise, will be disappointed by "Disgrace." Black and white here are not perfectly balanced like a yin and yang, and not perfectly blended like a shade of gray. The only racial harmony to be hoped for is nothing more -- or less -- than an uneasy truce, and a workable compromise. It is a flower in an unforgiving climate, that nevertheless has impossibly begun to bloom, at great cost to those who care for it. And, despite professor Lurie's syllabus, the film ends on a note that would require not a quote from Byron's Romanticism but from Yeats' Modernism: a terrible beauty is born.