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However long I stay I will always love you
Whatever words I say I will always love you
I will always love you" - Lovesong, The Cure.
Distance can be a tricky thing to quantify. You can be physically close to somebody but emotionally distant. You can be physically distant but emotionally close. You can be on the other side of the world and never stop thinking of someone. Or you could be just down the road and barely spare them a thought.
There is distance between everyone. Distance between friends, distance between families, and distance between lovers. Sometimes we create it ourselves and other times it is forced upon us by others, by society, by responsibility, by 'honour', and, in the case of Sebastian Lelio's quietly confident new film Disobedience, by all those things and more.
It's a film that touches on grief, loss, love, heartbreak, one's sense of belonging, and one's sense of duty. At its crux it pivots on the eternal dilemma of whether to be true to one's heart or whether to try to please those you love, and those who care for and about you. Even if that is to your own detriment. It's a dilemma that anybody capable of reflection will have wrestled with many times in their life.
Disobedience tells the tale of Ronit (Rachel Weisz), a successful photographer living in New York and estranged from her Orthodox Jewish family in London. She's called away from an assignment photographing a heavily tattooed gentleman to be informed her father, the highly respected Rav (Anton Lesser), has died while delivering a sermon on free will in his synagogue and, after a brief section in which we see her drinking, shagging a stranger in the toilets of a bar, and ice skating alone (standard grief stuff, basically), she catches a plane back to London to be confronted with a past she's clearly been running away from all her adult life.
There she's greeted by her childhood friends Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) and Esti (Rachel McAdams) who, to Ronit's surprise, are now married. Dovid was Roni's father's favourite disciple and almost more of a son to the Rav than Ronit was a daughter. There's clear tension in their history and there's even more in their current relationship. But it's as nothing compared to the sangfroid between Ronit and Esti.
Something has clearly happened in the past and that something, even more clearly, is still unresolved. How, and if, it will be resolved soon becomes the emotional hub of the drama with the death of the Rav revealed to be merely a plot device so that Ronit, Dovid, and Esti can all come together under the same roof and allow the secrets and lies of their past to either bring them closer together or, slowly, destroy everything they hold dear.
I say 'secrets and lies' because there is something reminiscent of Mike Leigh's imperial phase in the way these intimate personal dramas are played out. How Lelio skillfully creates a picture which shows us how the structures we build to protect ourselves from hurt can be cages in which we become prisoners of our own suppressed emotions and desires.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to escape inherited circumstance and though our families and friends may be kind and loving they may also be incurious, they may lack empathy, and they most certainly will have their own emotions and desires that, often, will not be compatible with our own. If you then add into the mix adherence to an outdated, and no longer fit for purpose, Abrahamic 'faith' then you are creating something of an emotional impasse in which being able to live both a good, and a fulfilled, life starts to look almost impossible.
The comfort blankets of life can really start to itch after a while, but it is to Lelio's great credit that we see events from the perspective of each of the three leading protagonists and we understand each of their motivations and concerns. Dovid wishes only to advance in the synagogue, have children, and live an honourable life. Esti wants to be a good wife and has channeled much of her energy into the profession of teaching yet remains, obviously, unfulfilled both physically and emotionally, and Ronit is torn between putting a metaphorical bomb under the petit-bourgeois concerns of her extended family and hotfooting it back to the US and her other life. Permanently, this time, it's implied.
Weisz, McAdams, and Nivola all put in wonderful, realistic, performances, Lelio's direction is calm and assured and he trusts the characters to tell the story (adapted from a 2006 book by Naomi Alderman) without the need for any clunky exposition, Matthew Herbert's score is unobtrusive, making solid use of diegetic sounds as well as The Cure song quoted at the head of this piece, familiar London locations underlined that this is a story that could happen to anybody I know, and the supposedly 'strong' sex scene both rang true and managed to encapsulate all the thrill and danger of an illicit erotic encounter.
But it was with the small gestures that Disobedience spoke to me the loudest. It was a film in which nobody set out to do anybody else any harm but people still got hurt. To see kind and fair people being put through an emotional wringer is, necessarily, upsetting and in that Disobedience felt like a film with a warm, and human, beating heart.
In a poignant, moving, profound, and articulate piece of correspondence on his Red Hand Files website back in October, Nick Cave responded to a letter from Cynthia in Vermont in relation to the recent bereavements both had suffered with these incredibly moving lines:-
"It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable."
Disobedience looked at grief and it looked at love and it came to a very similar conclusion. To feel joy is to feel pain. To feel pain is to understand joy. To love is to grieve and to grieve is love and, that doesn't change and never will, no matter the distance between people.
Whatever words I say I will always love you
I will always love you" - Lovesong, The Cure.
Distance can be a tricky thing to quantify. You can be physically close to somebody but emotionally distant. You can be physically distant but emotionally close. You can be on the other side of the world and never stop thinking of someone. Or you could be just down the road and barely spare them a thought.
There is distance between everyone. Distance between friends, distance between families, and distance between lovers. Sometimes we create it ourselves and other times it is forced upon us by others, by society, by responsibility, by 'honour', and, in the case of Sebastian Lelio's quietly confident new film Disobedience, by all those things and more.
It's a film that touches on grief, loss, love, heartbreak, one's sense of belonging, and one's sense of duty. At its crux it pivots on the eternal dilemma of whether to be true to one's heart or whether to try to please those you love, and those who care for and about you. Even if that is to your own detriment. It's a dilemma that anybody capable of reflection will have wrestled with many times in their life.
Disobedience tells the tale of Ronit (Rachel Weisz), a successful photographer living in New York and estranged from her Orthodox Jewish family in London. She's called away from an assignment photographing a heavily tattooed gentleman to be informed her father, the highly respected Rav (Anton Lesser), has died while delivering a sermon on free will in his synagogue and, after a brief section in which we see her drinking, shagging a stranger in the toilets of a bar, and ice skating alone (standard grief stuff, basically), she catches a plane back to London to be confronted with a past she's clearly been running away from all her adult life.
There she's greeted by her childhood friends Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) and Esti (Rachel McAdams) who, to Ronit's surprise, are now married. Dovid was Roni's father's favourite disciple and almost more of a son to the Rav than Ronit was a daughter. There's clear tension in their history and there's even more in their current relationship. But it's as nothing compared to the sangfroid between Ronit and Esti.
Something has clearly happened in the past and that something, even more clearly, is still unresolved. How, and if, it will be resolved soon becomes the emotional hub of the drama with the death of the Rav revealed to be merely a plot device so that Ronit, Dovid, and Esti can all come together under the same roof and allow the secrets and lies of their past to either bring them closer together or, slowly, destroy everything they hold dear.
I say 'secrets and lies' because there is something reminiscent of Mike Leigh's imperial phase in the way these intimate personal dramas are played out. How Lelio skillfully creates a picture which shows us how the structures we build to protect ourselves from hurt can be cages in which we become prisoners of our own suppressed emotions and desires.
It can be extraordinarily difficult to escape inherited circumstance and though our families and friends may be kind and loving they may also be incurious, they may lack empathy, and they most certainly will have their own emotions and desires that, often, will not be compatible with our own. If you then add into the mix adherence to an outdated, and no longer fit for purpose, Abrahamic 'faith' then you are creating something of an emotional impasse in which being able to live both a good, and a fulfilled, life starts to look almost impossible.
The comfort blankets of life can really start to itch after a while, but it is to Lelio's great credit that we see events from the perspective of each of the three leading protagonists and we understand each of their motivations and concerns. Dovid wishes only to advance in the synagogue, have children, and live an honourable life. Esti wants to be a good wife and has channeled much of her energy into the profession of teaching yet remains, obviously, unfulfilled both physically and emotionally, and Ronit is torn between putting a metaphorical bomb under the petit-bourgeois concerns of her extended family and hotfooting it back to the US and her other life. Permanently, this time, it's implied.
Weisz, McAdams, and Nivola all put in wonderful, realistic, performances, Lelio's direction is calm and assured and he trusts the characters to tell the story (adapted from a 2006 book by Naomi Alderman) without the need for any clunky exposition, Matthew Herbert's score is unobtrusive, making solid use of diegetic sounds as well as The Cure song quoted at the head of this piece, familiar London locations underlined that this is a story that could happen to anybody I know, and the supposedly 'strong' sex scene both rang true and managed to encapsulate all the thrill and danger of an illicit erotic encounter.
But it was with the small gestures that Disobedience spoke to me the loudest. It was a film in which nobody set out to do anybody else any harm but people still got hurt. To see kind and fair people being put through an emotional wringer is, necessarily, upsetting and in that Disobedience felt like a film with a warm, and human, beating heart.
In a poignant, moving, profound, and articulate piece of correspondence on his Red Hand Files website back in October, Nick Cave responded to a letter from Cynthia in Vermont in relation to the recent bereavements both had suffered with these incredibly moving lines:-
"It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable."
Disobedience looked at grief and it looked at love and it came to a very similar conclusion. To feel joy is to feel pain. To feel pain is to understand joy. To love is to grieve and to grieve is love and, that doesn't change and never will, no matter the distance between people.
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