By NICOLAS RAPOLD

“Disgrace,” Steve Jacobs’s feature adaptation of J.M. Coetzee’s best-selling 1999 novel, arrives with all the boons and burdens of its controversial prizewinning source.

Ten years after being published, the potent, compact tale of postapartheid South Africa has become a minor contemporary classic, a status further confirmed when Mr. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. But the traumaladen story - which features rape, racial tension and a civilized chauvinist as our eyes and ears - still presents a vision of violence and forgiveness that can provoke and possibly divide audiences.

“I came away from the novel feeling that you had to be the judge,” Mr. Jacobs said from Sydney, Australia, in a telephone interview recently. “I tried to make the film like the book. It was a surgical examination of a situation, not an argument for or against the situation. It’s like you’re a witness rather than a participant.”

“Disgrace,” which had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and opens in the United States this month, faithfully relates the novel’s shocking events while retaining its controlled style.

The story divides, brutally, into before and after. Driven to resign after an affair with a student, a white Cape Town professor, David Lurie, seeks refuge with his only daughter, Lucy, on her lonely homestead in the hinterlands. Their casual walk with her dogs one day turns into a nightmare: three black strangers who ask to use the phone attack them instead, raping her and setting him afire before stealing his car.

The aftermath is also provocative: Lucy decides to stay at her farm and not to report the sexual assault. This stoic attachment to the tract she owns and shares with a black farmer, Petrus, infuriates her father, and the film, with its majestic images of the rugged citrusgrowing backcountry northeast of Cape Town, underscores the pull of the land in a way not possible in the book.

“We needed to establish how magnificent the South African landscape is and the relationship of both black and white to the land,” Mr. Jacobs said. “It was very important to give the audience some reason for comprehending why Lucy would want to stay.” Mr. Coetzee’s only public statement about the film praises its success at “integrating the story into the grand landscape of South Africa.”

The novel’s overbearing and sometimes unpleasant narrator proved more of a challenge. Rather than rely on a voice-over, the character of David, played by John Malkovich, assumes the role.

Reviews of the movie, which has opened internationally, have been wary, admiring and bitter by turns. The complex reception makes sense for an adaptation of a novel that is respected enough to appear on school reading lists yet has been condemned by Mr. Coetzee’s Nobel-winning countrywoman Nadine Gordimer and others as simplistic, racist or worse.

Though the savage violence in “Disgrace” may seem worlds away, it remains a fact of life for at least some South Africans, for whom the growing pains of the post apartheid era run deep.


Jessica Haines and John Malkovich in “Disgrace,” based on the novel by J. M. Coetzee, who won a Nobel Prize in 2003.