Not so long ago I had planned to visit South Africa this summer for the FIFA World Cup.  OK, it was actuallt 2006, and I was so captivated by that tournament that I swore I would go to the next one.  Of course during the years in between life went on and my enthusiasm for the trip waned a bit.  I realized the expense would be high, and especially now being unemployed it just became one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time.

Well last night I saw a movie that made me glad I skipped this trip.  Disgrace, starring John Malkovich.  It actually came out in 2008, it seems, but our local indie theatre has it now.  Malkovich plays a Cape Town university professor who has an affair with one of his students.  When he is found out he refuses to conform with the university’s viewson a proper apology and leaves the city in disgrace.  He moves out to a remote farm to stay with his lesbian daughter.  And then the bad shit happens.  They suffer a home invasion at the hands of three black youths, and the daughter is raped.

OK, that’s bad.  Probably doesn’t happen to everyone in South Africa, though.  Probably would be an isolated incident.  Certainly not enough to colour a persons view of the whole country that badly, right?  You’d think.  But the protrayal of the country as a whole is what really does it.  The good neighbourhoods have walls around the houses, with spiked tops and iron gates.  The bad neighbourhoods do too, except they are just in a worse state of repair.  The entire film is blanketed in racial tension, and while some characters seem to legitimately want to make reparations for the past wrongs of society, they seem to be the ones who wind up suffering the most.

In the end it was a pretty good movie.  But I wouldn’t recommend the South African Tourism Council use is in any of their promotional campaigns.