Disobedience | Little White Lies

Dis­obe­di­ence

30 Nov 2018 / Released: 30 Nov 2018

Two women with long dark hair touching foreheads in an intimate moment.
Two women with long dark hair touching foreheads in an intimate moment.
3

Anticipation.

Rachel Weisz is on a major roll of late. So let’s see what she’s up to here.

2

Enjoyment.

She’s let down by weak material and a film which looks down on too many of its characters.

2

In Retrospect.

It’s pretty dismal all told.

Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams are unable to lift this hack­neyed tale of for­bid­den love.

If you chem­i­cal­ly for­mu­lat­ed the con­cept of mid­dle­brow art, trans­port­ed it to a lab and then attempt­ed to dis­cov­er what the very mid point of the mid­dle­brow looked like, Sebastián Lelio’s uned­i­fy­ing sixth fea­ture, Dis­obe­di­ence, would turn up in the test tube. It’s a hack­neyed tale of for­bid­den love amid North London’s ortho­dox Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty, and it method­i­cal­ly tells you exact­ly what you’re sup­posed to feel, who you’re sup­posed to admire and who you’re sup­posed to despise with a grim­ly method­i­cal rigour.

As with his pre­vi­ous film, 2017’s A Fan­tas­tic Woman, Lelio seems con­vinced that those who don’t har­bour a pro­gres­sive world­view are evil incar­nate, and so we are shown a raft of devout­ly reli­gious folk who think noth­ing of oppress­ing those acolytes who refuse to toe their deeply con­ser­v­a­tive line.

Rachel Weisz’s Ronit is a world­ly pho­tog­ra­ph­er, dis­placed from Lon­don to New York, who returns home on the occa­sion of her estranged father’s funer­al. At the wake, she bumps into her old pal Esti (Rachel McAdams) who is mar­ried (clear­ly against her will) to affa­ble Rab­bi Dovid (Alessan­dro Nivola). It’s not long before the rea­son for Ronit’s exile is revealed. The film takes the sim­ple cal­cu­la­tion of focus­ing on a social sect, zero­ing in on a prim­i­tive atti­tude, and then pro­ceed­ing to explain why that atti­tude is wrong.

The actors invest as much as they can in the thin mate­r­i­al, yet it all comes togeth­er in a way that’s nei­ther chal­leng­ing nor par­tic­u­lar­ly insight­ful. Sus­pense is repeat­ed­ly built around peo­ple ran­dom­ly wan­der­ing in on illic­it roman­tic bunk-ups (guys, not on the pub­lic ten­nis courts!) and there’s a ridicu­lous­ly over-ramped love scene which sug­gests that beneath every bash­ful, but­toned-down prig is a sleazy sex mon­ster just wait­ing to emerge.

It’s not that Lelio’s aim isn’t true, it’s more that he appears to believe that empa­thy should not be extend­ed to the igno­rant. And it ruins his films.

You might like