Disobedience

Synopsis: Immediately following the death of her father, a respected rabbi, New York-based photographer Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) returns to London and the orthodox Jewish community that she grew up in and suddenly departed from many years earlier. Her visit is an uneasy one. Her father had effectively ostracized her after he found out about her intimate relationship with Esti (Rachel McAdams). Esti has since married Dovid (Alessandro Nivola). their best friend, who was also the rabbi’s  protégé, and is trying to be a dutiful Jewish wife but Ronit’s reappearance taxes her resolve.

Sebastián Lelio’s first English-language film is thematically closely related to his previous film, the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman (2017).  Both films are about individuals fighting for sexual self-determination in the face of entrenched social opposition. Whereas the earlier film tackled broad societal norms, the reach of Disobedience is limited to observing the manners and mores of a small and tightly-knit religious community and in particular three people whose lives have been powerfully affected by it. It is a skillfully-crafted film that benefits from its circumscription, both in terms of giving us an insight into what is for most of us a closed environment and in foregrounding a strong emotional dynamic between its three leads.

The film begins with an elderly rabbi giving a sermon about free will. He speaks of angels, who follow the word of God, beasts, who follow their desires, and humans who have free will and thus the ability choose between these two poles. Having gotten this far with what is effectively the film’s apologia, he collapses, dying shortly thereafter. He is, it turns out, Ronit’s father and the story proper starts with her turning up unexpectedly at his wake where clearly she is under some kind of cloud of disapproval. She even makes her old friends, Esti and Dovid, uncomfortable. Gradually we find out why. Ronit and Esti had an adolescent affair. Ronit left the community at the cost of losing her father’s love while Esti and Dovid have chosen to stay with the community and observe its rituals and values. As Ronit reflects on her decision Esti reveals that she is unhappy in her marriage and the affair between the two re-kindles.

Adapting a novel by Naomi Aldermann the director, who co-wrote the screenplay with Rebecca Lenkiewicz, allows all this to unfold at an unhurried pace, the narrative focussing particularly on the thaw between Ronit and Esti. This builds to the revelation of a deeply passionate physical relationship one which reaches a crescendo (neither Weisz nor McAdams holds back in this department) in a hotel room after a visit to Ronit’s family home.

Weisz who regularly works in the art-house sector is no stranger to this kind of confrontational material and she is, as ever, completely convincing as the older, more self-possessed of the two. McAdams, however, considerably out of her glamorous comfort zone with little make-up and for most of the time sporting an unflattering wig is winning as the more vulnerable, more desperate and therefore more insistent of the two. Nivola provides a strong third corner to this heated situation.

Stylistically Disobedience can be seen as a stripped-back, more formally elegant re-take of A Fantastic Woman. There a couple of niggles. Dovid and Esti’s home seems incongruently upscale (both are teachers) and the scenes of them in class introduces an overly literary feel whilst the use of The Cure's ‘Love Song’ is too pointed (a similar thing happened in A Fantastic Woman with Aretha Franklin's ‘[You Make Me Feel Like] A Natural Woman’). These are however small things in what is in many ways a classical screen romance, just of the distaff variety   

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