LADY IN ER D
The always watchable Judi Dench gives another masterclass as Britain’s treacherous...
Red Joan Cert:15A 1hr 41mins ★★★★★
Ilove a film that gets under way at high speed, and Red Joan is certainly that. In the space of barely 90 seconds our ageing antiheroine has pruned a bush in her suburban front garden, read the paper – ooh, look, someone important at the Foreign Office has died – and answered the insistent knocking at her front door. It’s Special Branch, who are there to arrest her, frogmarch her off down her own garden path and swiftly charge her with 27 breaches of the Official Secrets Act.
Trevor Nunn, the acclaimed theatre director who likes to make a feature film every decade or so, is clearly in no mood to hang about. He’s also keen to deploy his secret weapon – Judi Dench – whose mission impossible it is to convince us, albeit for only 100 minutes, that spying for the Russians isn’t necessarily the most wicked and dreadful high treason.
And being the ever-watchable Judi, she does it, of course, helped by the judicious editing of history and by Nunn’s clever use of that most overworked of cinematic devices, the flashback. Here, however, the latter works rather beautifully, transporting us back to the idealistic, tweedclad, aspiring-spy-riddled world of Cambridge University in the late Thirties. Another country, indeed.
What ensues is inspired by the little-known but real-life story of Melita Norwood, who was born in Bournemouth in 1912, educated in Southampton and spied for the Russians for some 40 years. By the time the British intelligence services caught up with her nefarious activities, she was in her 80s and it was decided that prosecuting her was not in the public interest.
Lindsay Shapero’s screenplay takes considerable creative liberties with the underlying story, which is fair enough for a film actually adapted from a Jennie Rooney novel. Not only is our central
character now called Joan Stanley but the action is shifted forward into the immediate pre-war period, a feminist subtext is introduced by making Joan a gifted science undergraduate, and we learn that what she did then she did for… well, shall we say one part idealism, one part love. It shouldn’t work but it does, helped naturally by Dench’s performance – a masterclass in conveying internalised indecision (Should she confess? Did Special Branch spot her Che Guevara mug?) and general befuddlement as the ageing Joan is interrogated, and also by the casting of Sophie Cookson. The Kingsman star is pitch-perfect as the younger Joan, who may be a gifted physicist but has a habit of falling for the wrong men. They’re either married or, er… exotically handsome Russian agents.
As the latter (and with a title like Red Joan, I don’t think I’m giving much away) Tom Hughes – who plays Prince Albert in TV’s Victoria – is less convincing, the effort of combining brooding good looks with a wayward mid-European accent perhaps proving something of a stretch for the Cheshire-born actor. Far more convincing is Tereza Srbova, who plays his equally glamorous cousin, but then she was born in Prague.
With Nunn at the helm there are some lovely supporting performances to enjoy in a film that has obvious wartime echoes of recent British films such as The Imitation
Game and Their Finest. Ben Miles doesn’t have a lot to work with as the older Joan’s lawyer son, but what he has he uses to good effect, while Stephen Campbell Moore provides his customary quiet class as the Cambridge professor who leads the organisation engaged on vital wartime research that Joan joins as an over-qualified assistant.
I loved the constant shifting to and fro in time between the younger (and very pretty) woman of principle and the older woman faced with the daunting prospect of finally paying for those principles. But it’s the modest shift forward in history – into the real horrors of World War II and the dawning of the Nuclear Age – that make the film work.
Suddenly, it’s pacifism and a desire to save thousands of lives that becomes the driver rather than a deep-seated love of Stalinist communism.
Mind you, Judi Dench could probably make us warm to that too.