He replies: “No, that is not the moral. What was ignoble about the spectacle was that the poor dog had begun to hate its own nature. It no longer needed to be beaten. It punished itself. At that point it would have been better to shoot it.”

David’s remarks reflect his arrogant, still unrepentant attitude toward the behavior that prompted his dismissal. A sensualist and a snob who identifies with Lord Byron, he freely admits he broke university rules by seducing Melanie Isaacs (Antoinette Engel), an attractive mixed-raced student whose boyfriend publicly exposed him. But in his heart he feels little shame. Facing a university disciplinary committee, he pleads guilty to whatever charges have been lodged against him but insists he is not interested in hearing those charges and refuses to defend himself.

In the countryside with Lucy, David has found a tentative peace that is soon shattered. His remarks about desire foreshadow traumatic events that take place minutes later. Returning to the farm they encounter three young black men who ask to use the telephone. Moments later David is viciously assaulted, locked in a bathroom, his head doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire. Lucy is raped (it is not shown) and the dogs in her kennel shot.

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. In the story, set in postapartheid South Africa, the rage of the oppressed black majority is at full boil, and the relative invulnerability felt by many white intellectuals like David remains intact; the past still haunts the present.

Lucy, unlike her father, has her eye to the future. Her move to the countryside with a lesbian lover, who has abandoned her on the farm, suggests a personal decision to forsake urbanity and pursue a radical renunciation of power and privilege by living a simpler life closer to nature and in harmony with her neighbors, black and white.