In Contention

Tag: Anna-Maria Monticelli

  • SHORT TAKE: “Disgrace” (***1/2)

    John Malkovich in Disgrace“As long as one is alive, one is all right.”

    These words, spoken with pithy irony by John Malkovich halfway through Steve Jacobs’s brilliant, bruising adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s novel “Disgrace” — which opens Stateside tomorrow — encapsulate a post-apartheid South Africa more riven by crime and inequality than the bandages of democracy can cover. It’s a world where survivor’s grief is constantly chased by the threat of a more fatal occurrence; where, with no commodity more valuable than security, ugly human compromises must be made.

    Published in 1999, Coetzee’s novel was a well-aimed bullet to the heart of a nation still negotiating its social and racial prejudices, laying them bare with few pointers towards reconciliation. Denounced as racist in some quarters of the ruling African National Congress, it doesn’t cast any social group in a particularly flattering light. Rather, it focuses on individuals, and the very different ways they manage their escalating mistrust of the other.

    The story’s dependence on the country’s multi-splintered cultural differentiations makes the outside-in achievement of Australian director Jacobs (and his wife Anna Maria Monticelli, who wrote the screenplay) all the more miraculous. I can’t recall another feature film that so tangibly evokes the country that I grew up in, from its point-on account of lingering (and shifting) master-servant acrimony to minute details of production design.

    (more…)

  • Under the radar: ‘Disgrace’

    With the Toronto festival just around the corner, one title set to bow there that isn’t garnering that much attention yet is Australian production ‘Disgrace,’ the long-gestating adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner J.M. Coetzee’s searing 1999 masterpiece.

    That’s not exactly surprising, given that it’s a sophomore effort from a director, Steve Jacobs, whose previous credit, the flavourful but slight comedy “La Spagnola,” didn’t make much of an international ripple in 2001. The film is tiny; it also promises to be (if they do it right, at least) intensely bleak. The lone ‘name’ involved, John Malkovich, is something of a niche figure. Suffice to say that there are any number of starrier, sexier prospects in the TIFF lineup.

    But in a quarter already boasting its fair share of prestigious literary adaptations (“Revolutionary Road” and “The Road” being just two of the most anticipated), this is the title that has me most intrigued. I admit my South African bias possibly comes into play here. But you don’t have to be from the country to know what an astonishing novel “Disgrace” is – one that picks apart the moral identity of post-apartheid South Africa with a precision and ruthlessness of Dostoyevskian proportions. In 2006, The Observer named it the greatest “British” (cheekily including the Commonwealth) novel of the last 25 years.

    (more…)