Butler's Cinema Scene

Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams

“DISOBEDIENCE” My rating: B 

114 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Disobedience” is being described as a lesbian love story. Admittedly, it’s shot through with erotic yearnings

But that label is too limiting. This latest effort from Chilean auteur Sebastian Lelio (whose “A Fantastic Woman” won the foreign language Oscar this year) is more accurately about breaking away from an unfulfilling past to face a future of uncertain possibilities.

Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) has already made that break.  The only child of the rabbi of an uber-orthodox Jewish community in London, Ronit years earlier fled that insular world and the likelihood of an arranged marriage, moved to New York, changed her name to Ronnie Curtis and launched a career as a fine arts photographer concentrating on society’s fringes.

Upon receiving the news that her widowed father has died, Ronit goes to a nightclub, drinks and dances and ends up having sex with a man in the restroom.

Everyone grieves in their own way.

Flying to London, Ronit is met with varying degrees of compassion and suspicion. Some members of the religious community shun her; the newspaper obit states that her father “had no children.”  But she’s given a room by her father’s long-time student/disciple David (Alessandro Nivola) and his wife Esti (Rachel McAdams). The three were friends during their teenage years.

Ronnie begins to question the wisdom of returning. Her father’s will gives all his possessions, including his house, to the synagogue. And she’s perturbed that Esti, who as an adolescent shared her dissatisfaction with life in a strict religious community, is now the wife of the man who stands to become the new leader of that community.

Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola

About a third of the way through, the screenplay by Lelio and Rebecca Lenkiewicz (based on Naomi Alderman’s novel) shifts from Ronit’s story to Esti’s. This young woman has long been aware of her lesbian yearnings, but in her closed-off world exploring those desires was impossible. Marriage to a good man and obedience to the community’s standards seemed the only way to go.

But Ronit’s arrival has stirred old feelings and the two embark on a furtive affair.

To this point in the story there’s been no indication that Ronit is anything but straight, and she is initially shocked by Esti’s advances. Nevertheless she is swept up, both by the erotic charge between the two women and by her recognition that Esti is living the cloistered, repressed life she had the luck to escape.

In enterprises of this sort the male in the triangle is usually painted as either a villain or conveniently ignored. But Nivola’s David emerges as a sympathetic character dismayed that the woman he loves and the life he has built are being taken away, yet too humane and caring to make it all about himself. It may be this hard-working actor’s finest screen performance.

Ultimately “Disobedience” is less about lesbian love than about the freedom to choose one’s destiny. That’s a theme that transcends every religion and culture.

| Robert W. Butler