Chilean director Sebastián Lelio seems obsessed with the various female experiences within a patriarchal society. His 2013 masterpiece, Gloria, was about a middle-aged woman who has the spirit of a twenty-something and is unafraid to show it. Last year’s A Fantastic Woman was about a transgender woman facing torment from the family of her deceased lover – the movie won him the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. This year’s Disobedience is an English-language adaptation of a Naomi Alderman novel set within a London Hasidic Jewish community. Like his previous two features, it focuses on a woman – well, two actually – and all that they must fight against to feel spiritually free.

Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) is a high-profile photographer living in New York City. When she learns that her father, a well-distinguished Rabbi living in London, has passed away, she decides to return home for the first time in years to pay her respects. Her return is met with shock, not the least from former childhood friend, Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), who’s home everyone is sitting Shiva. Dovid was a beloved pupil of Ronit’s father, and the heir to his leadership position in the synagogue. Ronit was shunned from the community over past discretions, but Dovid welcomes her with open arms. It isn’t until Ronit learns that Dovid has married Esti (Rachel McAdams) that things become complicated once more.

Ronit, Dovid and Esti, former childhood friends, now find themselves living under the same roof for the first time in years, two married to each other and the third living a faraway life in America. The three try to stay civil but the tension is obvious, and chilling. Ronit was able to escape after her bad behavior, but Esti became further entrenched, pushed into a marriage with a man she’d always seen more as a friend than a lover. Esti and Dovid’s life was simple and happy enough, but Ronit’s return brings forth former passions and feelings, and unwanted truths arise which were once buried. In an attempt to say goodbye to her father, Ronit instead encounters a rather complicated domestic situation fraught with suppressed emotions.

There’s a severity to Disobedience that wasn’t always present in Gloria and A Fantastic Woman. A certain lack of humor. It’s emotions are high and untamed, but Lelio never really accepts the melodramatic tactics that this story is begging for. Instead, he plays the story softly, shaving the sharper edges. Ronit and Esti share more than a friendship, while Dovid is forced to confront the structure of his own faith with his former friend’s return. He is much more accepting than his peers, but his tolerance is still limited by the confines of his faith. Ronit has no patience for the medieval nature of this community, but Esti is caught in the middle, torn between a powerful belief and a helpless feeling of imprisonment.

There’s so much to process throughout this film, but I fear the movie does little with any of it. Weisz, McAdams and Nivola are solid enough performers to make this a watchable film, but Lelio brings little life to this palpably ripe dramatic situation. Even the love scenes feel more fetishistic than romantic, an odd time to pull out a cinema-verité aesthetic. I wanted to like this film much more than I ultimately did. It seemed perfect for Lelio’s milieu, his ability to dive into the complex psychologies of his female characters. Disobedience‘s story is more tied to restrictions of religious intolerance than basic gender roles, and Lelio seems unable to shift his gears accordingly, and so being, the film feels just as spiritually lost as its characters.

 

Directed by Sebastián Lelio