Tag: community

Disobedience

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Highly respected rabbi Rav Krushna (Anton Lesser) addresses his synagogue about the qualities that make mankind different from the animals and the angels. Man, he says, has free will. Alone in creation, he is able to disobey his creator. Then, as if struck down for preaching some treatise in defence of apostasy, he collapses.

Ronit Krushka (Rachel Weisz) is a British portrait photographer working in New York. She is promiscuous, rootless and seems to be looking for something although she’s no idea what. One day she gets a phone call which makes her return to London and the Hendon orthodox Jewish community which she left years ago. She heads straight for the house of Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola), at once her father’s favourite pupil (and likely successor as Rav) and an old childhood friend. She’s a little surprised to find he and her other great childhood friend Esti (Rachel McAdams) are now man and wife. The couple agree to put Ronit up during her stay.

Two things become clear as the narrative plays out. One, Dovid’s relationship with the Rav is the father/child relationship that Ronit never had with her father. Dovid spent hours discussing Jewish religious texts with him while Ronit wasn’t really interested. But now she’s back, she wants proof that her father really did love her. Scant evidence is forthcoming on that front. Two, Ronit and Esti were in love back in the day. Ronit chose freedom from the religious community and got out; Esti married a husband as the community expected and made herself fit in. However although Dovid is a good man who cares deeply for Esti, there’s a certain spark missing in the relationship. A spark which threatens to ignite when Ronit returns.

There is much to admire here – tortured performances which plumb the depths of the soul from its two female leads, a feeling that the Orthodox Jewish background has been researched and put on the screen at a very deep level, unresolved issues with a departed father. It’s a world unfamiliar to the movies and to most cinemagoers, but the film plunges you right in. Director Sebastián Lelio and cameraman Danny Cohen seem completely in sync in their dealings with the cast, ensuring that those amazing things that actors do end up on the screen without the mechanics of film making getting in the way.

The theological and human contradiction of the Rav’s opening and final address underpin everything that follows. What is obedience? What is transgression? What’s more important – the community or the individual? As the two women struggle with their feelings for each other and events take their predictable course, you can almost feel the boxes of a contemporary Western individualist view being ticked off. Almost. The piece seems to be at its strongest where its characters struggle with these tensions.

Weisz is one of the instigating producers behind the project and has chosen well both in source material and director. It’s a surprisingly effective and cinematic movie adapted from a novel, a process which all too often produces the exact opposite outcome. Leilo having proved himself highly adept at stories involving women’s issues such in Gloria/2013 and transgressive sexuality in A Fantastic Woman (2017) here delivers a compelling story in a completely convincing, parochial North London environment. The result could so easily have been a tedious plod, but somehow, it all comes together. An impressive achievement.

Disobedience is in cinemas from Friday, November 30th (2017). On BritBox on Wednesday, March 17th (2021). On Mubi on Sunday, June 5th.

Metalhead (Málmhaus)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Tragedy befalls a rural Icelandic farming family when son Baldur (Óskar Logi Ágústsson), summoned for dinner by younger sister Hera (Diljá Valsdóttir), falls off the tractor into the threshing device he’s towing. A chunk of flesh comes off and there’s a surprisingly small amount of blood. The sequence is not perfect: had it been far more explicit with more blood, gore and medical detail, that would have fitted with the film’s subsequent investment in the excesses of heavy metal music.

The family predictably goes into shock and at the church funeral Hera glowers at a painting of Jesus. She deals with her loss by (1) adopting her brother’s metal band T-shirts, leather jackets and trousers (which, unbelievably, fit her perfectly) and burning all her own, very ordinary, young girl’s clothes, (2) listening to his heavy metal record collection and (3) playing metal riffs on his guitar and amp. She tries to leave the area for Reykjavik, but at the stop can’t bring herself to board the bus. After a few years, Hera is still living in the area as a metal-obsessed and -garbed teenager (Thora Bjorg Helga) and the guitar has inexplicably turned into a Flying V.

Neither of Hera’s parents have coped well. Her mum Droplaug (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) retains the dead boy’s room as if he were still alive while her dad Karl (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) blames himself for not putting a cover on the driveshaft. They’re pretending everything’s fine when it really isn’t and their relationship has grown cold. They’re also failing to meet the spiritual/emotional needs of their teenage daughter – not the easiest of tasks at the best of times and one made much worse by all three surviving family members’ repression of their tragedy.

Subplots involve Hera’s childhood friend Knútur (Hannes Óli Ágústsson) whose platonic relationship soon turns more physically sexual and newly arrived parish priest Janus (Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarsson) who bonds psychically with the girl when she learns he not only likes all the bands she does but also has a metal tattoo on his shoulder. The latter wisely rejects her attempts to throw herself at him.

The film has a few glimmering moments. An early meal time scene has mother glower at daughter while some tomato sauce hangs off the edge of Hera’s plate like blood in a still from an unmade horror film festering in the back of the writer-director’s mind. And the hand of a small kid in a metal T-shirt makes a respectful Sign of the Horns to Hera in a local shop.

There is much to admire in the portrait of a small village where community and Christian religion are woven together to everyone’s benefit, although viewers may wince at the way when Hera moves in with Knútur she suddenly abandons the leather jackets in favour of the more conservative woolly jumpers and outdoor weather jackets that everyone else wears. As if to say, in this community you need to conform, it’s unacceptable to be that little bit different.

Metalhead is available to stream on all major VoD platforms, and is part of the Walk This Way collection.