Disgrace

Australian actors Steve Jacobs and Anna-Maria Monticelli co-wrote and -produced La Spagnola, a wildly comic melodrama highlighting the vengeful anger of a passionate Spanish widow in an Australian nightmare setting. Directed by Jacobs, it appeared in 2001. After seven years, the pair of creative talents produced their second feature, and it's equally out-of-the-ordinary above-average cinema.

Disgrace is a faithful version of the Booker Prize-winning novel by South African Nobel-winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, examining an unlikeable Cape Town university Eng Lit professor in a racist, sexist, post-Apartheid setting. He's played by one of America's more individualistic actors, John Malkovich. Although he dominates the screen as usual, he is strongly offset by a South African newcomer, Jessica Haines, as his lesbian daughter working a small farm. He retreats there when forced to resign his post after seducing a student of Indian background.

Malkovich's accent sounds right, academic English with a muted South African snarl. His role is that of a sardonic egocentric self-consciously living up to his own Byronic ideals, and his stay in the bush gradually forces him into an awareness of other people's harsh realities. A black farmer is encroaching on the daughter's land, black youths rob the farm and rape the daughter, and other symbols of change and ageing humiliate the professor. He will, one senses, need to change and humble himself by the end of the movie.

Coetzee's novel is a picture of white South Africa in miniature: decadent, arrogant, increasingly irrelevant and self-pitying. Those are emotions that Malkovich has long portrayed well, even comically well in Burn After Reading. He's in his element here, on location in the empty beauty of eastern Cape province.

It seems strange that official Australian production funds and yet another American acting talent were used to dramatise a modern classic novel about South Africa. Some location work in Australia may have justified it, and hopefully will be enough to ensure that Jacobs and his partner don't have to wait another seven years to deliver another masterful movie.