Steve Jacobs directs Coetzee's "Disgrace" (2008)
The film was utterly compelling throughout, from the first sight of Professor David Lurie's eyes peering from behind window blinds, to the last shot of him and his daughter Lucy going into her house. There was the danger of David Lurie losing all sympathy from the audience at the beginning of the film. (John Malkovich who plays him, said in an interview, that he could make any character unlikable.) But the risk is part of the bigger risk the film took: there will be no easy sympathy in this movie. The shift in political power in South Africa leaves Lurie fearful, and this fear expresses itself in his concern for his daughter living out in the country by herself. When she is raped by three young black men, his worst fears are realized, and he seeks police action against the "criminals." His own earlier affair with a reluctant student he sees as Byronic passion and not as wrong. The latter understanding comes to him only through his daughter's experience. Lucy, as p...