Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Universal story
‘Tenderness and emotion’ at the core of ‘Disobedience’ Rachel Weisz explains the impetus behind latest project
British actress Rachel Weisz has worked nonstop since her breakthrough role in “The Mummy” in 1999 but recently she found herself aching to star in a project driven by female characters.
Cue the actress’s fascination with “Disobedience,” a lesbian love story based on an acclaimed novel by Naomi Alderman. The movie, which has netted positive reviews in limited release, marks one of Weisz’s first projects as a producer.
“About three or four years ago, I decided I wanted to start finding material to be in, and I wanted to find a good role for a woman,” says the actress, 48.
“I thought it would be great to have two good roles for women and have women in relation to one another, rather than a woman in relation to a man, which is what I’m used to doing and what most films are about.
“So, I read a lot of lesbian literature and this one struck me because it’s contemporary. It’s not set in the ‘50s, where this kind of sexuality is taboo, but in the present day.”
Unfolding in London’s Orthodox Jewish community, “Disobedience” begins with a photographer named Ronit (Weisz) returning home after the death of her rabbi father.
Ronit’s arrival is fraught with tension. Not only has she been banished for being a gay woman but she has complex relationships with her father’s successor (Alessandro Nivola) and his wife Esti (Rachel McAdams) with whom she’s still deeply in love.
Weisz found the film’s look at a cloistered world one of its most fascinating qualities.
“It’s set three stops on the Tube from where I grew up in London so it’s near but far,” says Weisz, an Oscar winner for “The Constant Gardener.”
“It could have been set in the Amish community or the Mennonite community, like “Witness,” which was about a different kind of sexuality, but also about forbidden love.”
Over the course of the movie, Ronit and Esti acknowledge their attraction to each other and eventually come together for a passionate encounter.
Weisz says she was determined that the sequence be performed without any sense of inhibition.
“In a way, the [love] scene was much more important than [love scenes] have been in any film I’ve made before,” she says. “Sex scenes can often feel gratuitous and you think, “Could the story do without this? Yeah, it probably could.”
“In this case, absolutely not. It was the center, the heart of the movie, because everything was leading up to this explosion of freedom, particularly from Esti.
“So it was essential storytelling... I’ve never done a sex scene that was that emotional. Very rare.
“It wasn’t just about sex and passion or erotica, although it was about those things too. It was about tenderness and emotion and release and it had a huge, symbolic meaning in the film.”
Before the movie began, Weisz and McAdams remained distant, never feeling the need to hang out to together to establish a bond.
“We didn’t [meet outside of the set] and we didn’t really want to,” says Weisz, who is married to Daniel Craig and pregnant with their child. She also has a son by director Darren Aronofsky.
“We met before we filmed and talked through things with [director] Sebastián [Lelio] but we didn’t go off on our own and do [any] method acting.
“I don’t think either of us works in that way. Chemistry is something that either happens or it doesn’t. I like to think it did.”
For Weisz, it was important that gay audiences responded to the love story at the center of the film.
“I’ve spoken to… lesbians… and they’ve mostly been very — I don’t want to say grateful but — happy and validated at being represented [onscreen],” says the actress. “They felt, for instance, that the sex scene was really good and right and moving. Gay women I’ve spoken to thus far have all really loved the movie.”
As one of the film’s producers, Weisz was partly responsible for enlisting Lelio to direct. The Chilean helmer, who scored raves for his movie “Gloria,” recently won the Best Foreign Language Oscar for “A Fantastic Woman.”
“Sebastian… really connected with the universality in the story, which transcended its Judaism or its Britishness or anything.
“I didn’t know what he was going to bring to it. I just knew that, having seen “Gloria” and “A Fantastic Woman,” that he puts people who are normally in the margins of storytelling front and center.
“This would be true of these two women. They’re not mainstream movie fare. I just trusted him to go on this voyage… I knew that he was passionate and unsentimental and empathic and glorious.”