Review of Disobedience (2018) by K Nife C — 20 May 2018

With this kind of star power, I could foresee Jewish lesbian romance genre film taking off in a big way. We aren't talking Blue is the Warmest Color levels of explicit erotic entertainment, but one could easily expect to see an uptick in Pornhub's search trends for the lead actresses' titillating scenes that lie herein. Yes, you get to see Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams break kosher without a sheet, but just like similar forbidden love stories like Brokeback Mountain, Carol, or Howard the Duck, the movie is much more than the sum of its private parts.

Set in a very insular Orthodox Jewish community in London, Ronit (Weisz) returns to mourn the passing of her father, one of the most prominent Rabbis of her childhood home. As in many cases, her traditionalist extended family and the people that surrounded her father are all a bit shocked and perturbed by her arrival after she had made a clean break from her upbringing and culture years before. Her mere presence is insulting to some and welcomed by those who cared the most for her, namely Esti (McAdams), a former love interest who has married straight despite her homosexual leanings. Many awkward pauses and loaded looks ensue.

Director Sebastian Lelio is no stranger to the clash between alternate lifestyles and how they play out in conservative family dynamics. After winning Best Foreign Picture at the Oscars last year for A Fantastic Woman, this seems a perfectly serviceable next step. Considering Lelio's Chilean (and presumably Catholic) background, the director does a fantastic job of inhabiting the liturgy and community of a culture and religion he hasn't lived within. Doubly surprising is how in both this and A Fantastic Woman he can help bring to life characters who do not fit into rigid social constructs and portray them in a tasteful, multifaceted way.

Conceivably, one could place this story in the context of any other religious group. Aside from the candlesticks and hats, this could be a Mormon, Amish, or Southern Baptist group and they probably wouldn't miss a beat seeing as how most of the prevailing tenets of those faiths are predicated on a tradition that assumes it has what is best for family and culture yet fails to account for the ways of the world and how the moral zeitgeist shifts. You can't really pick up a book and prescribe to everyone a behavior set that goes against their basic biology, but when all you know, see, and have is structured around that book, is there really any free will for HaShem to judge you by?