In 2020, Pedro Almadóvar’s Pain and Glory would make a dent on the awards circuit, as would Celine Sciamma’s romance Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, one of the best-reviewed movies of recent years. Meanwhile, Love, Simon made history in 2018 as the first mainstream, wide-release teenage rom-com to focus on a gay character (a spin-off TV series, Love, Victor, enters its second season on Hulu this year). At the 2019 Oscars, Olivia Colman was named Best Actress for playing the lesbian queen Anne in The Favourite, beating out Can You Ever Forgive Me?‘s Melissa McCarthy, who played lesbian writer Lee Israel.
In 2016, Carol earned six Oscar nominations, and just a year later, for the first time in history, Moonlight became the first LGBTQ+-themed movie to win Best Picture. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.It’s been a big few years for LGBTQ films. “Disobedience” opened in theaters on April 26, 2018. “Of course, getting it wrong would be awful, misrepresenting what we’re trying to represent.” She can rest easy: Everything was conducted with honor. When asked if she had any reservations about taking on a gay role with such an explicit scene, Weisz paused briefly before casually replying no. But if you go to the cinema, you’ve just been shoved out, and you’re not being represented.” Obviously, if you are gay, your subjectivity is the center of your life. I think that’s where the most interesting, beautiful, deep stories can happen. “People who don’t fit into the mainstream. Like Lelio, Weisz said she is also drawn to telling stories of people on the fringes of society. “He just doesn’t objectify, he subjectifies. The first was “Gloria,” which he will remake in English starring Julianne Moore, and the second was “A Fantastic Woman,” which won the Oscar this year for Best Foreign Language Film. “Disobedience” is Lelio’s third film in a row about women on the margins of society. By being together and by having sex, and that paradox between being lost and deeply in touch with who you are.” Or, how they find themselves through getting lost. “It was mainly about the faces … and how they get lost. “They knew what they had to do, and we were all in agreement, and then we could work within those limits.” He said he challenged himself to do the scene with very little nudity. “It seems like they are they are flying free, but really everything was very controlled, so that was good for all of us,” Lelio said. To borrow a line from Dovid: “It is important that everything be conducted with honor.” The lesbian sex scene on screen, which has been distorted for and by the male gaze, is here rendered respectfully and gracefully, while still delivering the lustful thrill its characters deserve. In the scene which Lelio calls “the heart of the film … the deepest layer,” Ronit and Esti tumble into bed with equal parts wild abandon and tender sensuality. Surprisingly, it is Esti who makes the first move, catching Ronit off guard. In the film, the tension between the two women is palpable the minute they lay eyes on each other, though their story unfolds at a delicate pace. Although her childhood best friend, Dovid (Alessandro Nivola), welcomes her cautiously, she is surprised to learn he and Esti are now married. Ronit returns home after the death of her rabbi father, having left her religious life behind years ago.
When Rachel Weisz saw Sebastián Lelio’s film 2013 “Gloria,” about a 58-year-old woman’s sexual re-awakening, she knew she could trust the Chilean director with “ Disobedience.” It was Weisz who approached author Naomi Alderman about adapting her eponymous novel for the screen, about Ronit (Weisz), a woman who rekindles a teenage affair with Esti (Rachel McAdams), a woman from her Orthodox Jewish community.