The year 2019 was significant for Nobel Literature Prize-winning South African author JM Coetzee. The Death of Jesus, the last book in his famous Jesus Trilogy, was published that year, which also witnessed the world premiere of a movie based on his novel Waiting for the Barbarians at the Venice Film Festival. While the Jesus Trilogy ended with a triumph, the same couldn’t be said about the film adaptation, which received neither critical acclaim nor commercial success.
Seven years later, another rare cinematic adaptation of a Coetzee book happened, this time at the Cannes Film Festival, held from May 12 to 23. Aquí, the Spanish language film based on Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy, had its world premiere in the French Riviera on May 18. The 203-minute film was screened in the Cannes Premiere category, in the presence of Coetzee, 86, who is notorious for shunning literature festivals and award ceremonies.
“It was the first time Coetzee watched the film,” beams Tiago Guedes, the Portuguese filmmaker who directed Aquí, about the movie’s world premiere at the packed Debussy Theatre in Cannes. “At the end of the screening, he gave me a hug. I felt that he was emotional. And he is not an emotional person,” adds Guedes. “It was a strong hug.”
At 3 hours and 23 minutes, Aquí is a long movie, combining The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019). “The first cut was 4 hours and 30 minutes,” laughs Guedes, whose first encounter with a Coetzee book was the Cape Town-born writer’s highly-acclaimed novel, Disgrace, about post-Apartheid South Africa. Disgrace won Coetzee his second Booker Prize in 1999, which was followed by the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later.
Condensing 800 Pages
Aquí tells the story of a dystopian world where everyone starts over without a past as a refugee. One of them is David, a six-year-old, who accepts two unrelated individuals, Simón and Inés, as parents, reinventing the idea of family. Things take a turn for the worse when David refuses to be shaped by the norms imposed on the people and affirms his rights of freedom and imagination.
“The first time I read the Jesus Trilogy, I connected with it. After several years, Paulo Branco (a Portuguese producer well known for his long association with the late veteran director Manoel de Oliveira) told me that he could get the film rights from John (John Maxwell Coetzee). I said, ‘Okay, let’s try to adapt these 800 pages, which is crazy’,” recalls Guedes about the origins of the movie adaptation. “I then started working on the script with Luís Araújo, the other screenwriter of the film. It was a matter of removing a lot of things and chasing the right path for the story I wanted to tell,” adds the director, whose 2022 film, Traces, was also an official selection in Cannes.
Guedes, who directed The Domain that competed for the Golden Lion in Venice festival in 2019, remembers the collaboration with Coetzee as “very smooth”. “I didn’t know him, but then I went to meet him in Granada in Spain. I enjoyed meeting him. It was a wonderful moment. He’s very quiet. He doesn’t speak much. But the energy was just right,” he adds.
Guedes and his Aquí co-writer Araújo showed Coetzee the first draft of the script and the second draft. “He replied with comments, but then he said, ‘I don’t want to be more involved. I want you to just go ahead.’ But there were some little things that we wanted his opinion for, because it was important for us, because the goal was to try to reproduce the feeling I’ve got reading the books,” says Guedes, who didn’t want to ruin the adaptation with plot or over-explanation. Interestingly, Coetzee himself had written the screenplay for the 2019 adaptation of Waiting for the Barbarians starring Johnny Depp.
Bureaucracy and No-Places
Aquí fully absorbs Coetzee’s vision in the Jesus Trilogy of a “no-place” that is full of bureaucracy in which everything works and everything is manageable, and people can live for free. “But then it’s lacking something. It’s like there’s no salt in the food or there’s no spice in the food,” says Guedes. “The thing I like about the book is the people in it start the world as a kind of refugees who need to adapt and adjust. And, of course, the book speaks to all the times, especially to our times.”
There was no exchange of letters between Guedes and Coetzee, except an email from Coetzee’s wife, which was “very concise and short”. Ninety per cent of the film’s shooting took place in Portugal, for “almost three to four months”. “We stopped shooting in December last year, then it was edited during a six-month-long post-production,” explains Guedes.
Only four of Coetzee’s novels have ever been adapted into movies before. The first was the adaptation of In the Heart of the Country (1977) by Belgian director Marion Hänsel under the title Dust in 1985. The Lives of Animals (1999) became a television movie in 2002 directed by American filmmaker Alex Harvey. Disgrace was adapted in 2008 by Australian filmmaker Steve Jacobs, followed by Waiting for the Barbarians in 2019 directed by Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra, whose 2015 film, Embrace of the Serpent, was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer