Spoilers for Disobedience (the book and the movie)
Now, onto the movie.
As I previously mentioned, I read Disobedience after not having seen the movie since 2022. To put it simply, I was let down. While the Disobedience movie gave us a passionate, tragic romance, the book was focused on other aspects of the narrative, leaving the queer love story disappointingly neglected. Because of this, I watched Disobedience again, craving a closer comparison.
For a quick summation: In the book, Ronit’s cousin Dovid is practically a main character alongside Ronit. It’s Esti, Dovid’s wife and Ronit’s childhood sweetheart, who falls by the wayside. Her feelings for Ronit amount to little more than repression and past idealization. At the end of the book, Esti makes a speech at the hesped of Ronit’s father and says that she is a lesbian but she will not be ashamed of it. She remains married to Dovid, comfortable and satisfied with her choice. With little emotion, Ronit leaves her and returns to New York.
But even with this strange unsatisfying romantic ending, Disobedience (the book) didn’t intend for Ronit and Esti to be the core focus. Instead, it’s about Ronit’s relationship with her faith and, consequently, her recently deceased father.
I’d almost forgotten how differently Dovid comes across in the book and movie. In the book, he’s casually accepting of Esti’s sexuality and even her connection to Ronit, caring deeply for both of them and being amused by her arguments with the community. In the movie, he’s more protective of Esti, not wanting her to be hurt by Ronit again. In the end, it’s not Esti who gives a speech but Dovid, telling Esti he accepts the breaking of their marriage.
Interestingly, Dovid isn’t written as Ronit’s cousin in the movie, only the childhood best friend of Ronit and Esti. But this makes the most beautiful scene of the film shine all the brighter: Dovid opening his arm to share Esti with Ronit and accept the bond formed between them, neglecting his religious customs.
When it comes to comparing the book and movie, the greatest change (aside from the obvious Ronit/Esti focus) comes from Ronit’s faith journey. The book is heavy in Jewish history and culture, with Ronit struggling to find a place for herself between worlds. She can’t be the perfect frum wife, but she can’t be the cold-hearted apostate, either.
In the movie, however, Ronit’s relationship with her father takes center stage. It’s clearly linked to her religious background, but movie Ronit is firm in denouncing the culture she was raised in and refusing to compromise.
Her relationship with her father is tangled and unsatisfying, with him having died before ever seeing her again. In the book, Ronit struggles with the knowledge that her father was ill for weeks and never reached out to her in all that time.
We learn that Ronit left her community when she was young, following her father’s discovery of her relationship with Esti. This makes Ronit’s tension with her father linked more specifically to her sexuality rather than her religious decrying as a whole.
I liked the added detail in the movie of Ronit being a photographer. It lends to the painful final scene of the film, with Ronit keeping what little of her father she can and accepting the unfinished nature of their relationship.
Of all the details that were improved from the book to movie, I was surprised by one of them being missed. In the book, Ronit is in search of her mother’s candlesticks in her father’s house. She fails to find them and finally says as much to Esti, revealing that Esti had them all along – Ronit’s father gave them to Esti so that Ronit could have them if she one day returned. This was a powerful scene, quite literally giving Ronit a gift from her father and delivering her a small portion of resolution.
The ending of the Disobedience movie varies wildly from the book. As I previously mentioned, the book has Esti staying married to Dovid and Ronit leaving, but it doesn’t end there. It jumps forward a year later in the final chapter, with Esti and Dovid having named their baby after Ronit’s father and Ronit has a new job. That’s everyone’s “happy ending.”
Obviously, the movie didn’t take such a route. Esti’s marriage to Dovid is more fraught, leading to the inevitable conclusion of their eventual divorce. Ronit offers for Esti to come live in New York with her. (An offer she should’ve made sooner – telling Esti to divorce Dovid and then staying silent when she says “and where would I go” wasn’t a good move, girl!) But Esti doesn’t follow Ronit. Instead, she’s sleeping on the couch, signifying her gradual exit. In a tearful kiss goodbye, she promises to write to Ronit and tell her where she’ll go. And so their story ends ambiguously.
Esti might reunite with Ronit one day, or maybe she’ll stay closer to Dovid to raise their baby. Or maybe she’ll take an entirely new path to figure herself out. She couldn’t have chosen Ronit, not when she finally had the freedom to choose her own future. Leaving her community entirely and escaping to New York would’ve been too much for her. She needs to decide who she is before she decides who she’ll be with forever.
Like Call Me By Your Name, this is a queer book with a “years later” epilogue that explicitly keeps the two leads from being together. And like CMBYN, the epilogue wasn’t in the movie adaptation, leaving the viewers free to make their own theories on the characters’ future.
Back when I was 20, I remember watching Disobedience and finally understanding why people complained about gay love stories rarely having happy endings. They’re more frustratingly uncommon than I realized.
But a cliched happy ending wouldn’t have served the plot or its leads well. While the ambiguity in the closing of Ronit and Esti’s romance is annoying, it lends itself to the tragedy of their situations and pasts.
There’s no sequel for Disobedience on the horizon, which makes sense. It’s a story centered around a single life-changing event – the death of Ronit’s father – and the characters have already had their revelations. I can imagine a sequel, though, if it were focused entirely on Esti. I’m envisioning a storyline where she goes off travelling – either pregnant, with her baby, or postpartum – to discover who she is without being defined by Dovid or Ronit. In this journey, she could eventually find her way back to Ronit, having come to terms with who she was and who she is now.
(There’s the obvious messy issue of the baby. If Esti leaves for New York to be with Ronit, she’ll be taking the baby away from Dovid. If she leaves the baby with Dovid, she’ll be separated from them. So that’s a messy situation – one that speaks to the open ending of the movie.)
This is the ending I like to imagine for Disobedience. Not Esti merely choosing Ronit, but choosing herself first and foremost.
Disobedience is a beautiful movie, wonderfully acted with a brilliant soundtrack. The end credits, oh my heart. It’s a clear elevation from the source material, hurting my heart out of bittersweet fondness rather than lingering disappointment. I know I haven’t watched it for the last time.
