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

Tiago Guedes’s Aquí ambitiously adapts Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy into an on-screen saga that’s rich in biblical allusion and philosophical enquiry but occasionally losing narrative momentum.

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.