Rachel Weisz Compares Lesbian Drama ‘Disobedience’ to ‘Shape of Water’

Lesbians and fishcan you name a better pair?

Oscar-winning actress Rachel Weisz compared her new lesbian drama Disobedience to best picture winner The Shape of Water in a new interview, the Toronto Sun reports.

“There’s drama because Rachel McAdams’ character and my character are not free to love who they want to love,” Weisz said. “[It’s] kinda the same way as like The Shape of Water–different genre, fantasy, period, but it’s like, how can you be free to love who you want [to love].”

In an interview with INTO, director Guillermo del Toro said that he took it as a compliment that people read The Shape of Water, which depicts a heterosexual interspecies romance, as queer.

“I think that the beauty of the movie is that the love presented in the movie is completely plural and encompassing,” del Toro said. “Part of the joy of the movie for me is to show ‘the other’ as the very thing that we need to cherish and treasure. I think that was first and foremost in my mind in creating the story and crafting the script.”
In addition, at the time that The Shape of Water won Best Picture, INTO called it a “great queer best picture successor to Moonlight.”

Though it is certainly correct to say that The Shape of Water is a queer narrative, something definitely seems off about comparing a relationship between two Orthodox Jewish (OK, one former) women to a fantastical relationship between a woman and a fish. Maybe it boils down to the difference between queer people finding queerness in a non-queer narrative versus a heterosexual person comparing queer love to interspecies love.

Weisz also produced Disobedience and said she brought the film to the screen because it centered on a relationship between two women.

“I really wanted to tell a story about two women in relation to each other,” she said. “It could have been about a female friendship, and so I was reading lots of books about female friendship, and it always ended up being–I mean, there may be some books that I didn’t find – but it always ended up the women getting into fights over a guy, and I was like, ‘No, this isn’t the story that I was looking for.’”

“So I ended up finding lesbian love stories,” she added, “women in relation to one another as lovers.”

Sebastián Lelio, known for his Oscar-nominated film A Fantastic Woman, about a transgender woman living in Chile, directed Disobedience.

Photo by Jim Spellman/WireImage