Her usual facade of niceness forms the perfect cover for the roiling emotions Esti must conceal. That such strong interior work is done by McAdams, who I’ve previously discussed as a bit of an enigma for how little interiority she’s usually asked to depict, is nothing short of a revelation. Esti, on the other hand, has her life turned upside down again, upsetting the groove she’d painstakingly reconciled herself to. To the extent that she’s the audience avatar, we’re meant to see this world through her eyes, and she herself becomes invisible. Though the film introduces us to Ronit first, she’s merely an outsider, re-interloping in the Orthodox Jewish world that she left behind and that Esti still inhabits. The two leads are excellent, and if McAdams outshines Weisz, it’s mostly to do with the script. The sex scene is sexy, even kinky in its feminist appropriation of projecting bodily fluids, but even sexier is when, as they get dressed, photographer Ronit (Rachel Weisz) asks and is allowed to photograph Esti (Rachel McAdams). There is some nudity, to be sure, but it’s neither prurient nor pointedly avoided, but rather treated indifferently by the camera, a side-note to what it’s really focused on: lustful attention. Sebastián Lelio’s Disobedience (2017), and the work of its cinematographer, Danny Cohen, does this wonderfully. In an art form that has traditionally rendered the male gaze, it takes intentional distance from formal convention to keep the lens expressive of female desire.
Lesbian sexuality on the big screen can be a fraught endeavor.
#Disobedience 2017 series
Editor’s note: This piece is part of a series on the 2018 Golden Horse Fantastic Film Festival.
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