Director Sebastián Lelio (Oscar winner A Fantastic Woman) helmed this sensual, and thoughtful feature that intersects female desire with Orthodox Judaism and grief that one of its stars, Rachel Weisz, shepherded to the big screen.
Based on Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel, the film tells the story of Weisz’s Ronit, who’s escaped the cloistered environment of her youth to return to the north London neighborhood where she grew up upon learning of the death of her father, the rabbi.
There she rekindles a romance with her first love, Esti (Rachel McAdams), a lesbian who denied her true desire for her faith and married her and Ronit’s childhood friend Dovid (Alesandro Nivola).
The film contains a culminating “liberating” sex scene between Weisz and McAdams in the film.
“It was very important to me and to Sebastián that desire was at the center of the story,” Weisz told The Advocate. “After you’ve watched however many minutes of this quite repressed society where you can’t express your sexuality if you’re gay, when these women finally are alone together–the sex scene is incredibly important.”
“The scene where Esti comes–probably for the first time–that orgasm, to me, is her liberation. It’s her kind of freedom. It doesn’t just mean sex. It means so much about her agency and her self-determination,” Weisz added.
Disobedience is a meditation on freedom of choice, and remaining true to one’s self
