Sebastián Lelio directed 2017’s A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this spring and was one of my top five films of last year. His follow-up, Disobedience (available free on amazon prime), is his first English-language movie, but continues the theme of focusing on people who are and feel marginalized by their communities, in this case looking at two gay women who have taken different paths since their sexuality was uncovered by the Orthodox Jewish community where they lived. It’s based on the 2006 novel by Naomi Alderman, who later won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Power.
Ronit (Rachel Weisz) has returned to the community from exile upon learning that her father, Rav Krushka (Anton Lesser), has died, but it’s clear from her arrival at her childhood friend Dovid’s (Alessandro Nivola) house that she is an outcast. She’s also surprised to see that her other close friend from childhood, Esti (Rachel McAdams), has married Dovid in the interim, and that no one even tried to contact her to tell her of the wedding. Dovid invites Ronit to stay in their guest room, to the chagrin of the more conservative members of the community, and the film slowly reveals the history between the two women – that they had some kind of affair as teenagers, and were discovered by the Rav, which led to Ronit’s hegira to New York, but also led the Rav to push Esti to marry Dovid. The two women find their attraction to each other hasn’t dimmed, but as the flame is rekindled, the inevitable consequences ensue, and Esti and Dovid both find themselves facing difficult choices between the constraints of their insular community and the exercise of the free will that the Rav himself discussed in his final sermon.
The film is anchored by three very strong performances, McAdams’ in particular, as Esti has the central struggle in the film – deciding whether to even give in to her feelings, and then, since she does (in the movie’s one truly intense scene of action rather than dialogue), coping with the consequences and the choices she must make in the wake of those. You could diagram the film’s story as one where the troika’s friendship has devolved to the point that Esti is now pulled equally by one friend on each side – Ronit on the side of freedom, Dovid on the side of tradition or family or obligation. Nivola’s accent is utterly convincing; the American-born actor’s grandmother was a Jewish refugee who fled Germany in the 1930s, but he also studied Hebrew to be able to recite many of the lines in the film and the accuracy of the accent helps establish his character’s hidebound nature. When the denouement arrives, Dovid has as much to do with it as Esti does, with the film’s themes of agency and free will returning after the late Rav’s speech introduced them in the opening scenes. The ending might be a little too pat, making the next steps that come after the big decisions seem easier than they would certainly be, but the path that these characters take from Ronit’s arrival until that moment is a journey to appreciate.
