"Disobedience," Sebastián Lelio’s follow-up to his 2017 Oscar-winning film "A Fantastic Woman,"
and his first English-language film, starts with a Rabbi giving a
sermon about free will. He speaks of angels, beasts, and Adam and Eve.
He says, fearsomely, that humans are "free to choose." Then he drops
dead. There's something refreshing about a story so unconcerned with
"subtlety." Put it all out there. Foreground the theme. Underline as you
go. "Disobedience," based on Naomi Alderman's novel (with adaptation by
Lelio and Rebecca Lenkiewicz) is a good old-fashioned melodrama, albeit with a quieter touch.
Disobedience (2017)
The rabbi who dropped dead was Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser), an important figure in the London Orthodox Jewish community. His daughter Ronit (Rachel Weisz),
a New York-based photographer, left years ago. When she returns home,
she walks into the unchanged world of her childhood, looked at by
relatives and former friends with curiosity and concern. She is
rebelliously secular, with long free hair, cigarettes, short leather
skirts. The obituary for her father states that "sadly" he had no
children. It stings. She's been gone so long she had no idea that Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), taken in by her father as a protégé at 13, and Esti, her childhood friend (Rachel McAdams)
have gotten married. There's an awkward moment in the kitchen when she
makes the connection. The shock on Weisz's face is eloquent, although we
don't know the backstory yet.
The eloquence of the performances
is key to the material succeeding, since Lelio does not introduce the
characters, and their connections, in a straightforward way. It takes
some time before you figure out who Dovid is to Ronit, although from
their behavior you can tell they once were close. She forgets herself
and almost hugs him in a friendly greeting, and then laughs when he
recoils from her touch. Dovid and Esti invite Ronit to stay with them
during her time in London. This is playing with fire, since it soon
becomes clear that Esti and Ronit had an adolescent romance, well-known
to the community at the time. Lelio's approach helps us feel we are
thrust into the middle of a very tight-knit community, with a long
shared history. Exposition is always awkward, so Lelio doesn't bother
with it at all. "Exposition" wouldn't be spoken out loud in this crowd
since everyone knows everything about everyone else. Dovid and Etsi
don't yet have children. She is a teacher in a girls school and enjoys
her work. He is set to step into Rav Krushka's sizable shoes. Ronit's
arrival throws everything into confusion.
This is Lelio's third
film in a row about women (the first being 2013's "Gloria"), and he is
deeply empathetic to the ways in which repressive societies put women in
all kinds of impossible double- and triple-binds. In "A Fantastic
Woman," a trans woman fought to be allowed to grieve for her dead lover,
and Lelio's focus on the cruelty of the surrounding world pushed the
film into a nightmare-scape. He dials this back in "Disobedience." There
are no villains. Even the strict culture of Orthodox Judaism isn't
really a villain. The culture is shown as a close one, with many social
benefits, benefits which Ronit—in leaving—has missed out on. With all of
the dramatic and sexual stuff in the film, the best scene may very well
be a group scene early on, when Ronit joins Dovid and Esti's Shabbat,
attended by a small group of Ronit's relatives. The "mood" at the table
is far from friendly or warm, but it's also not toxic. This is a family.
Ronit is a lost lamb, but there is still space for her in the fold. A
lively debate occurs, and when Esti pops in unexpectedly with a cutting
observation, Ronit stares at her from across the table, thrilled. These
all feel like real people, not caricatures. (In this way, it reminded me
a little bit of Peter Weir's "Witness,"
where you could see why Rachel didn't just run away with the cop,
leaving the Amish world behind. You could see why she wanted to stay,
why she had to stay.)
The relationship between Ronit and Esti, past and present, is
clearly the focal point of the film, but Lelio takes his time getting
there. McAdams is miscast, but she does a fine job showing Esti's
burgeoning emotional life, exploding out of her in a rush: it is as
though time stopped for her when Ronit fled the community so many years
ago. But McAdams is so inherently positive. In a 1950s film,
she'd play a perky ingenue. She's wonderful here when showing
mischievous delight sneaking a puff off Ronit's cigarette. But when she
has to show Esti's anguish at being forced to marry in order to cure her
of wanting to sleep with women, she can't get to the depths required.
She knows what the depths are, but she can't get there in the way a Lili Taylor, or Elizabeth Moss, or Natalie Portman
could. But the scenes between Weisz and McAdams are fascinating, each
actress listening closely to the other, paying attention to every
nuance. It doesn't reach the scope of Grand Tragic Romance, but then, it
isn't meant to. These were two women whose normal adolescent crush was
banned. In a way, time stopped for the both of them.
The colors
of the film are subdued and chilly, all blacks, greys, smoky-blues, so
that at times it looks like a black-and-white photograph. It's
beautiful, in a classical and formal way. "A Fantastic Woman" featured
many surreal dreamlike images, but Lelio plays this one straight. So
straight, though, it is sometimes a detriment. It's the kind of movie
where teachers are shown giving lectures which directly comment on the
action of the movie. Dovid and his young rabbinical students discuss
sensuous love and its importance, and Esti discusses "Othello" with her
students. In one scene in "A Fantastic Woman," Aretha's "(You Make Me
Feel Like) a Natural Woman" is prominently featured, and in a scene in
"Disobedience," to break an awkward silence with Esti, Ronit spins the
dial on the radio and stops on The Cure's "Love Song," which just so
happens to narrate perfectly the emotions of the moment. These obvious
choices really stick out.
Pauline Kael observed that melodrama is
"the chief vehicle for political thought in our films," which you can
see time and again, particularly in films made before the 1950s. In
literature, melodrama can come off as overblown, preachy. But cinema can
make melodrama seem not just real, but urgent and relevant.
"Disobedience" could have gone even further in the direction of "Stella
Dallas"-melodrama torment. Some of it comes across as curiously
low-stakes, considering the circumstances. But, in a way, that's
refreshing too.
A woman returns to the community that shunned her
for her attraction to a childhood friend. Once back, their passions
reignite as they explore the boundaries of faith and sexuality.
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