Disobedience, Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel of the same name, follows the story of Ronit, a lapsed Orthodox Jew working as a trendy photographer in New York. The film opens on Ronit’s estranged father, the Rav Kruschka, giving an impassioned speech on the condition of mankind. He reminds us that humans are neither like the angels of God, unable to deviate from his will even for a moment, or the animals, who act according to their base natures and cannot aspire to any greater obedience. Humans are caught between two states and must be responsible for choosing how they live. Before he has finished speaking, he collapses.
Disobedience is set among a community that is trying to navigate this ambiguity. Everything is split into the pure and the impure: foods that are kosher and foods that are not, Shabbat and the workday week, men and women, the obedient faithful of Hendon, North London, and the world beyond. It can sometimes seem like observant Jewishness and queerness are necessarily in opposition to one another. One culture prioritises family and lineage, and the other encourages striking out alone if your family won’t accept you, deprioritising procreation if it won’t make you happy, and daring not to be respectable. Ronit, caught in flagrante delicto with her best friend Esti, chooses queerness over Jewishness. When her father demands perfect obedience, she splits herself off entirely, moving from England to America, changing her name and focusing on her career as a photographer (which is itself another form of defiance as Orthodox culture prefers text over images). When she returns to Hendon to mourn her father, Ronit tells Esti she hasn’t really been with any other women since their affair ended, but given the intensity of their reunion, this suggests less that her attraction to Esti was simply a phase and more that no one else could possibly replace her.
Ronit comes to stay with her cousin Dovid, not realising that he married Esti after she left Hendon. Following this revelation, Lelio reminds us of Ronit’s extreme separateness by setting her and Dovid’s discussion of the Rav’s death in a winter garden. Behind Ronit, we see an unkempt, rambling thorn and behind Dovid, neat, upright branches. One might be tempted to take these as a sly reference to the staffs of the twelve tribes of Israel, a symbol of patrilineal and religious authority. Dovid is positioned as an example of obedience and familial loyalty whereas Ronit was not welcome back even during the final phases of her father’s illness. When defending Ronit’s choice to use the non-Jewish name ‘Roni Curtis’ for her photography credit, Esti says “[women] take their husband’s names and their own history is gone”. Both women have tried to erase the unreconciled parts of themselves by choosing new names, one through marriage and one through work. Ronit becomes Roni, and Esti becomes the Rebbetzin Kuperman, her title as the wife of Rabbi Dovid Kuperman. Although the film does not include the scene in which Esti bathes herself in the mikveh, as she does in the book, it is made clear that her body has become a site of ritual purity, forgoing all sexual attention except for that of her husband. The camera focuses obsessively on her sheitel, the wig worn by modest married women, and on the long leather gloves she wears as a protection against the outside world.
Lelio makes the messiness of human identity and loyalties a major focus. While Ronit’s uncle Hartog is adamant she should leave before the ceremony to honour the Rav’s achievements, it’s made clear he doesn’t speak for everyone. Ronit is warmly commanded to stay by Hartog’s long-suffering wife, Fruma, after she arrives unannounced at Dovid’s house. When Ronit breaks traditional mourning protocol to listen to The Cure’s ‘Love Song’ on the radio, Esti doesn’t switch it off or admonish her. They both know the song and weep because it reminds them of a bond they once shared that was stronger than faith. Music is a means of emotional expression in all the films in Lelio’s loose trilogy about women. The titular character in Gloria (2013) sings along to the radio while driving through Santiago, hoping to meet a man who she can love as unreservedly as their lyrics describe, while Marina of A Fantastic Woman (2017) has her transformative moment in a nightclub, dancing to escape grief and prejudice. Here, in Disobedience, music is the release that everyone shares: the soundtrack to Ronit’s escaping of the past in New York, the old pop tune that reawakens her and Esti’s love for one another, the songs performed by the male choir. It is an outlet for an intensity of feeling that the characters must either ritualise or repress to make bearable. After they listen to the song, Ronit snaps and starts repeating Hartog’s diktat that she must leave before the ceremony. She does not see a way to remain in the Orthodox world without it reabsorbing her in her entirety, reminded by the song that there has never been any room for her here. And indeed there still seems to be no space in Hendon where she and Esti can be together in the way they want to: not the Rav’s house, not the house Esti shares with Dovid, and not the shadowy park where they are spotted kissing by a former classmate.
After this, Esti is given an official warning by the school where she teaches. When Dovid confronts her, he tries to put all the blame on Ronit. Esti insists, however, that her husband look at her and see human complexity. She tells him: “I have always wanted it”. Esti is no angel, nor is she Ronit’s dupe. Yet Ronit, listening from the stairs, won’t meet her halfway. When she encourages Esti to leave her husband, Esti asks her “Where will I go?”. Ronit’s failure to reply leaves a lacuna in which some viewers may hear the famous lines from the Book of Ruth: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Instead, Ronit rebooks her flight and sets off for the airport in the hope she can leave this mess behind her once and for all. She doesn’t want to bring Esti into the life she has made for herself in New York, and Esti can’t see a way out either, especially not after learning she is pregnant with Dovid’s child. Their parting words crystallise the film’s argument: the belief that they can only be one thing or another has not made either of them happy.
In Disobedience disparities in physical positioning emphasise separation between people and points of view. All the major arguments in Esti and Dovid’s house take place on the staircase with people ascending and descending. In the women’s section of the synagogue, Esti and Ronit are elevated above Dovid as he gives his speech praising the Rav’s wisdom. Although women are traditionally segregated in the gallery to avoid distracting the men, here they are framed as if sitting in judgement on Dovid. Even standing on the bimah, he cannot be level with them. It is only when Dovid re-interprets the Rav’s words about humanity and choice to refuse the role as a new leader the community, therefore setting Esti free from constant scrutiny, that he can stand with them again. Outside, all three of them are on one level at last and here they embrace.
Dividing things into bad and good is a fundamentally human impulse not limited to Orthodox Jews. Before watching the film I was concerned that without the sections of the novel narrated by Esti and Dovid, Disobedience would take the easy route of contrasting Ronit with the Orthodox community, making her reasonable and all of them ultra-serious caricature bigots. At a time of mounting anti-semitism this would have been not only unfair but irresponsible, even if one disagrees with their traditional attitudes towards women and homosexuality as strongly as Ronit herself does. But the film shows the diversity within the Orthodox community and the changes that Lelio makes to the ending of Naomi Alderman’s book present us with a more hopeful vision of how the two identities might be reconciled. The last moments of the film give us reason to believe that Esti and Ronit will be able to maintain a relationship, if an unconventional one in which Esti remains living with Dovid as they raise a child together. And although this reunion might be implausibly romantic, Disobedience, in focusing on the characters’ shared humanity, makes an important point about the need to accommodate difference.
