Sinful Rebbetzin

Rachels Weisz and McAdams practically shtup on a Torah in Disobedience.

- David Edelstein

THREE NICE JEWISH girls in two very different kinds of movies occupy my Tribeca Film Festival– oriented column this issue, and I am—as my shtetldwelling ancestors would have put it— farblondzhet. My confusion comes from the fact that there is but one set of laws handed down by God but so many fascinating ways of disobeying them. Praise Ha’shem for not making me a Talmudist.

The lesbian Orthodox drama Disobedience starts with a kind of challenge. An elderly British Orthodox rabbi—the most respected kind, a rav played by Anton Lesser with fun Olivier cadences, turns away from the Ark and tells his rapt congregation (bearded men down front, bewigged women in the rafters) that humans, unlike angels and demons, are “free to choose.” Then he keels over, dead, which doesn’t look like a choice. But his words nonetheless hang over the film. Rachel Weisz plays the rav’s estranged daughter, Ronit, who is told of his death while in New York photographing an old man covered with tattoos (you shall not incise any marks on yourself); promptly has sex in a bathroom stall (you shall not drunkenly fornicate with strangers in loos); and goes ice-skating (the Torah is silent on ice-skating, except on the Sabbath). Then Ronit returns to London to help bury her dad, not expecting to run promptly into her old lesbian lover, Esti.