WHAT WE’RE WATCHING: JM Coetzee’s biblical trilogy comes to screen in daring cinematic saga

During a reading of what was then his forthcoming book The Childhood of Jesus, JM Coetzee expressed what he had in mind for its publication: “I had hoped that the book would appear with a blank cover and a blank title page, so that only after the last page had been read would the reader meet the title, namely The Childhood of Jesus.”

Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy, made up of The Childhood of Jesus, The Schooldays of Jesus and The Death of Jesus, is about a man and a young child – two strangers who find themselves flung together in an incidental father-son dependency.

After leaving behind their histories and languages, the pair meet during their crossing into a fictitious land where they’re assigned names: Simón for the man, and David for the boy. 

Now, seven years after the final book’s publication, the trilogy has been brought to the screen by Portuguese director Tiago Guedes, becoming the film Aquí starring Manolo Solo and Alex Peláez as Simón and David, respectively.

Originating from a set of books totalling about 900 pages, Aquí is no doubt a saga – a three-hour and 20-minute one at that.

“The first cut lasted four hours and 45 minutes,” filmmaker Guedes tells Cineuropa. “At one point we set the goal, perhaps a little idealistic, of reducing the film to three hours. But when we started to see the different edits, we realised that we couldn’t cut any more.”

The film’s duration doesn’t quite fly by. Still, it sustains intrigue well enough, starting with a dystopian-like premise that follows Simón’s determination to find David’s mother, or just any mother, as a matter of fact.

When David and Simón approach a woman playing tennis, she’s reluctantly roped into being the boy’s second parental figure alongside Simón. One of their first challenges is David’s schooling, where he resists engaging in the classroom yet eventually reveals that he’s been concealing remarkable reading and writing skills.

But when David’s instructed to write “I must tell the truth”, he writes instead, “I am the truth” – establishing the story’s biblical allegory.

As BD McClay writes of Coetzee’s work for The New Yorker, the character’s names, too, hold undeniable biblical allusions: Simón, the man who recognised the child Jesus; David, the house from which Jesus descended; and Inés, meaning chaste or pure.

In this way, the film’s first act, which covers Coetzee’s first novel in the trilogy, sparks intrigue by planting questions about who this strange boy is and why this unusual non-place he’s found himself in holds such powerful regulatory control over its people through language and social stakes.

“We must try to get along with the others,” Simón tells David when the boy expresses his hatred for speaking Spanish. “One way of doing that is to speak the same language.”

“That is the rule, and it is a good rule, so we must obey it,” he goes on to explain. “Not only obey it, but do so with an open heart and goodwill. Because if you refuse, you will find yourself living in a private world without friends.”

However, it’s in its latter 90 minutes that the film begins losing steam, as it shifts towards a series of events that hold a greater sense of figurative, and frequently ambiguous, literariness, which leaves much of the first act’s curiosities unresolved.

The strength of a film adapted from a book, or several books in this case, often lies in its ability to distil rather than to be all-encompassing. So, it’s in Aquí’s persistence to encapsulate the full thematic breadth of Coetzee’s work that becomes the film’s downfall.

Every other scene seems to be punctuated by David quizzing Simón on the meaning of abstract concepts like human nature and value, weighing the film down by incessant philosophising that detracts from its natural thematic core: fatherhood.

Manolo Solo’s performance as Simón carries an empathetic melancholy, capturing his complicated feelings about his involuntary role as a child’s guardian, while still acknowledging his undeniable bond with and need to protect David.

Against the detached flatness of the portrayal of young David, Solo brings a compassionate emotional weight to the father-son relationship. In the final act, David is played by an older actor, Hugo Encuentra, who instils a much-needed charisma and spirited depth in the character.

Each chapter of David’s life – corresponding to each book in the trilogy – is marked by a change in the film’s aspect ratio, which tightens in on the characters to become increasingly claustrophobic as threats of conformity and illness close in on the family.

Aquí is also a film void of a score, heightening the bleakness of its sterile, panoptic landscapes. Music only enters the narrative during the middle portion, where an oddly poetic style of contemporary dance takes centre stage as the mode through which David expresses his singular perception of the world.

Like the movie’s narrative itself, David’s style of dancing and, by extension, his understanding of life, defies comprehension. Some literary critics and scholars suggest that giving into the trilogy’s elusiveness is a valuable approach to the text.

“One of the ways in which we make it easier for ourselves to read novels that are baffling, and there are none so baffling as [Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy], is to look for a message,” Derek Attridge tells David Attwell during a conversation for LitNet’s literary podcast.

The Jesus trilogy, Attridge says, “resists the search for a message”. And it’s a view that Attwell endorses through the suggestion that “one should lose oneself”, much like how one would partake in a dance, to the books’ peculiarities.

Yet by watching the trilogy’s film adaptation, and experiencing a three-book-long story in one sitting, there does seem to be something noticeably missing. There are seeds left unplanted, leaving the spiritual gravity of the final act, taken from Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus, to feel ungrounded in narrative context.

Aquí is, without a doubt, a daring adaptation that challenges the audience not only through its runtime but also through its symbolic essence.

For avid readers of Coetzee, Guedes work could make for a fascinating subject of critique. As a standalone feature, however, it might leave one wondering whether the film’s vague mythological logic was worth the three-hour commitment. DM

Aquí is screening at the European Film Festival South Africa on 24 September.