Disobedience: A movie about desire and duty

Much of the press coverage of Disobedience has centred on Rachel Weisz who plays a woman unwelcome in her own community. In fact, it has been promoted as a Weisz movie. Its appeal, however, lies somewhere else.

Based on a novel, Disobedience is the story of a woman who had to leave her home as a child after she was found to be attracted to her friend. Years later, she returns home as an adult to an unpleasant welcome and unfriendly stares after the death of her father, a community patriarch.

Her return creates newer relations, again forbidden ones. Self-conscious and unwilling to conform to social norms, she is greeted with the news of the marriage between her former boyfriend and the childhood friend in question, played by McAdams, and is forced to stay in the same house where the couple lives. Their old friendship transforms into a tense and awkward physical relationship, signs of which are visible from the outset. The two women become one in their yearning to break free from the ultra-orthodox life that lays strict familial and gender roles for them. It is their relationship with each other, their community and those around them that forms the story arc.

Disobedience contains a complexity of narratives though they are delivered through a simplistic plot. Based on the conservative Jewish community life in London, the film unravels the mystery of living in a puritanical environment that often creates a conflict between desire and duty. Those who choose to part with religious doctrine are treated as pariahs. Unlike a rebellious teenage movie, the essence of Disobedience lies in the calculated rebellion of grown-ups who seem to have seen it all, and hence choose wisely. For a subject so tense and serious as the interaction between a taboo sexual relationship and religious orthodoxy, the movie creates drama through the chemistry between the two women at its centre and a man in their middle.

Although Weisz is the bigger brand here, McAdams leaves a bigger impression.

Someone also needs to talk about Nivola who plays a rabbi married to one of the two. He is the archetype of a conflict between religious obligation and the freedom to follow one’s own path. The actor has a lot to offer if anyone is paying attention. Despite the two women who dominate the screen, he refuses to be brushed to the sideline. A weaker actor in this situation would not have been able to make his presence felt.

With the mainstreaming of the LGBTQ movement in Hollywood, portraying homosexuality as nonconformity is not unusual anymore. Many recent films – Carol (Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara), The Danish Girl (Eddie Redmayne), Milk (Sean Penn) – have treated sexuality as a taboo facing social hostility or religious orthodoxy. We get it — it is hard to make such sexual proclivities work, especially homosexuality, and that is what creates tension in the plot of Disobedience.

With gay and lesbian relationships onscreen, however, many film-makers miss the mark. Weisz and McAdams, for instance, have an uncanny resemblance but that does not help their onscreen pairing. It is nothing close to the electric chemistry that Blanchett and Mara offered in Carol. That is but a small matter compared to the otherwise excellent treatment the subject has received from the director.

Lelio’s no-nonsense approach to film-making and straightforward script infuse realism to a theme that desperately needs one. He does not play around a lot, which leaves room for some real life drama. The gloom from London’s dark skies, where the film was shot, is sucked in and the orthodoxy’s colourlessness compliments, and completes, the gloomy picture the movie paints.

An earlier version of the review misstated that the film is based on the Hasidic Jewish community life in the United States. It is based on the conservative Jewish community life in London. We apologise for this error.

This was originally published in Herald's June 2018 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.