On Sunday, November 20, 2011, Cinema Art Bethesda will present the Australian film, Disgrace. The film is 119 minutes long and in English.
Synopsis
John Malkovich stars in director Steve Jacobs’ adaptation of J.M. Coetzee‘s Booker Prize-winning novel concerning a Cape Town educator whose flight from scandal leads him into a direct confrontation with the lingering demons of apartheid.
Fastidious Cape Town college professor David Lurie (Malkovich) may see himself as somewhat impervious, but he’s about to bring about his own downfall due to a selfish and foolhardy relationship with a student who isn’t afraid to drag their clandestine affair screaming into the light. When controversy erupts on campus as a result of the affair, David beats a hasty retreat to the countryside in order to lie low on his daughter Lucy’s (Jessica Haines) remote farm in the Eastern Cape. However, David’s fears for his daughter’s isolation are soon confirmed when father and daughter are violently attacked by three black youths.
In the aftermath of the horrific siege, David is deeply shaken to learn that one of their assailants is in fact a relative of trusted worker Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), who lives peacefully alongside Lucy in the South African brush, and has even begun constructing a home at the edge of her property. Can these people somehow find grace in a country that’s still struggling with its tragic history, or is that history destined to repeat itself forever into the future?
(text taken directly from Fandango via rovi)
Trailer available on YouTube or watch below.
Selected Awards and Accolades
Toronto International Film Festival
Winner of the International Critics’ Award (FIPRESCI) for Special Presentations
Selected Reviews
The New York Times
— Stephen Holden
Midway in “Disgrace,” a faithful, compelling screen adaptation of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel, its protagonist, David Lurie (John Malkovich), a haughty South African professor of romantic poetry, muses loftily about instinct and desire. “No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts,” he declares to his daughter Lucy (Jessica Haines) as they stroll through the arid, hilly landscape of the East Cape with three of her dogs. A hard-headed allegorical meditation on the bestial side of human nature and its reflection in a poisoned social climate in the throes of change, “Disgrace” is all the more devastating for being so coolly dispassionate.
The Chicago Sun-Times
– Roger Ebert
This is such a rare movie. Its characters are uncompromisingly themselves, flawed, stubborn, vulnerable. We feel we know them pretty well, but then they face a situation of such pain and moral ambiguity that they’re forced to make impossible decisions. It’s easy to ask them to do the right thing. But what is the right thing?
