Disobedience review: Rachel McAdams and Rachel Weisz star in erotically charged drama

Its sex scenes aren't especially graphic but have a power and emotional kick because of the characters’ pent-up lust for one another

Dir: Sebastián Lelio; Starring: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola, Anton Lesser, Allan Corduner, Nicholas Woodeson. Cert 15, 114 mins

Whatever else, Disobedience is surely the most intense and erotically charged film to have been made recently in Hendon. Based on the novel of the same name by Naomi Alderman, it is set in the Orthodox Jewish community in north London. Depending on whose vantage point you take, the main character Ronit (Rachel Weisz, who also produced) has either broken free from the stifling world of her childhood or has been banished from it.

She is a photographer living a Bohemian life in New York when she receives the call from someone back home telling her that her father, the revered “Rav” Krushker (Anton Lesser), has died. Her “sin”, referred to only obliquely, is to have had a lesbian relationship with a young woman from the community. Her father had had no communication with her for years.

Brilliantly directed by the Chilean-Argentine Sebastián Lelio, Disobedience is very different from typical British realist drama. Lelio gives even the most humdrum scenes shot in drab, grey north-London houses and streets an unlikely lyricism. Matthew Herbert’s music adds grace and melancholy to moments that might otherwise have verged on the banal.

The world Ronit returns to for her father’s funeral is a rigid and patriarchal one. The women are expected to marry, have children and defer to their husbands.

“Do you have to have sex every Friday evening?” Ronit asks a female friend. “It is expected,” comes the reply and we are not sure whether the friend is joking. Chain-smoking, ironic and free-spirited, Ronit provokes great suspicion among the Londoners. There is a very telling scene early on in which she arrives at the home of her old childhood friend, Dovid (Alessandro Niviola). He comes to the door.

Unthinking, she goes forward to embrace him but he holds back from her. Such physical touching and open expressions of affection aren’t encouraged. It is as if Ronit is a woman from another planet. He is glad to see her but also clearly intensely nervous about her. Lelio and his co-screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz extract the humour as well as the pathos from her predicament.

Ronit is startled to discover that Dovid has married Esti (Rachel McAdams), another of her childhood friends and one to whom she was once very close indeed.

“May you live a long life,” family friends will routinely say to Ronit. It’s a greeting they utter by rote but without any sincerity. They don’t want her there. They’re wary of her motives in coming home. Is she after her inheritance? Has she come to reclaim her lover? They can’t accept that she may simply want to grieve.

The film is even-handed in its portrayal of the Orthodox community. Its members aren’t caricatured. Nor does Lelio mock their notions of honour and propriety. They can be small-minded, gossiping and conspiratorial but they also show loyalty and decency. The Rav himself, shown at the start of the film addressing the synagogue, is a wise and very articulate figure, speaking with tenderness and understanding of the “tangled lives” of those around him.

For all the restraint the characters show to one another, we are always aware of the strength of the feelings they (and Ronit and Esti in particular) are repressing. Weisz gives a nuanced and complex performance as the Annie Liebovitz-like photographer who prides herself on her freedom and independence and yet still half-yearns to be accepted back into the community she fled.

McAdams, likewise, excels as the seemingly dutiful wife, still glamorous in the dark, dowdy clothes and wigs she is obliged to wear She is a far more subversive and rebellious figure than her husband can imagine. Nivola’s Dovid is an equally contradictory figure. He is devoted to the teachings of the Rav and honoured to be regarded as his potential successor but he is also strangely insecure.

The film never slips into prurience. Its sex scenes aren’t especially graphic but have a power and emotional kick because of the characters’ pent-up lust and longing for one another. Their jealousy is obvious too. (In case we don’t notice it, the film throws in a few heavy-handed references to Othello.) Another of the film’s strengths is its acknowledgement of the messiness of its protagonists’ lives. In more conventional dramas, everything would be tidied up in time for the final reel.

All the characters would somehow come to terms with their grief and sexual and social hang-ups and the lovers would be allowed to run off into the sunset. Lelio’s approach is open-ended and ambiguous. Ronit and the others unravel some of their problems but invariably discover new ones in their place.