In Disgrace, professor of literature, Dr David Lurie (John Malkovich), leaves the promising but elusive beachside Cape Town after he is asked to resign over a predatory affair with one of his students. Seemingly unaware as to why his actions are seen as wrong, Lurie goes to visit his daughter, Lucy (Jessica Haines), who lives on a hot, dusty and arid farm where she grows vegetables and flowers in the most unlikely of places.
Unsure of what else to do, it appears that Dr Lurie is fleeing to this isolated land to escape any real confrontation with his situation. Yet, as Rowan Williams writes in Silence and Honey Cakes: The wisdom of the desert, 'You "flee" to the desert not to escape neighbours but to grasp more fully what the neighbour is'. Indeed, the desert provides a context where he is forced to consider other people as the struggles which accompany this land work together to change his very person.
Lucy, a fiercely determined young woman reflects the strange coexistence of idealism and pragmatism. Despite the dangers of living alone in a harsh land amongst indigenous people in problem-ridden post-Apartheid South Africa, she believes in the need to remain. To leave would mean failing to be part of the solution to the country's current woes. Yet, in order to hold on to this ideal, she lives a self-sacrificing life full of pragmatic concessions. Over and over, Lucy chooses to quietly endure injustice at the hands of the black community. And despite her father's pleas for her to leave, Lucy chooses instead to make a range of rather pragmatic compromises. She understands intuitively that she must be pragmatic if her ideal is to actualise.
This theme is illustrated through Lucy's work of her dusty land. Her ability and determination to grow beautiful flowers and nourishing vegetables in an uncooperative landscape provide a metaphor for life in this place. Beauty does exist, but hard work is required first.
On the surface, it may appear that Dr Lurie is cast as the 'bad' example of how to (not) confront the problems of life and Lucy the 'good' example. This, I think, is too simple. The characters are more complex. Rather, the film captures what Rowan Williams says about fleeing and staying: 'The truth is that running and staying put are two sides of the same coin...both are finding the way to avoid the compulsive following of your individual agenda.' Both characters are frustrating for the viewer because you want them to deal with their problems in a quicker, easier, more obvious way. Yet, in different ways, the characters sort through what it is that functions as their own agendas and this is inevitably riddled with pain. There is no other way.
Again, writing about the experience of the early desert fathers (monastics), Rowan Williams inadvertently sums up this aspect of Disgrace wonderfully with this quote about life in the desert:
'...the commitment to stay within the "space" of these particular people's company, these daily disciplines, this unchanging environment, material and mental, is costly. It takes time, once again, to discover that the apparently generous horizon of a world in which my surface desires have free play is in fact a tighter prison than the constrained space chosen by the desert ascetics. When you have learned more or less successfully to "flee" some of the illusory landscapes in which life appears easier, you still have to learn how to inhabit the landscape of truth as more than the occasional visitor.'
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