The SPARROW has LANDED
Jennifer Lawrence bares all as a Russian agent in a graphic sex ’n’ spy thriller
Red Sparrow (15) Verdict: Violence, secrets and lies ★★★✩✩
Sparrows are inoffensive creatures and not conspicuously fanciable, so I’m still not sure why the russians give the name to spies highly trained in the art of seduction, with a brief to blackmail perceived enemies of the state.
Maybe long-tailed honey buzzard is too much of a mouthful. But, anyway, a sparrow is what Dominika Egorova, played by Jennifer Lawrence, becomes in this overlong but far-from-unwatchable thriller.
when I say overlong; there have been shorter Moscow winters. at any rate, a thriller that lasts well over two hours is in serious danger of diluting its thrills, which might be why red sparrow also throws in some decidedly graphic violence, including a rape, and gruesome torture scenes that the man next to me in the screening room was unable to watch.
we see Lawrence naked, too, which is interesting in light of her fury when hacked nude photographs of her were leaked on the internet back in 2014.
This time, I suppose, she is in control of the situation. perhaps tellingly, the most revealing shot comes in a classroom scene at what her character calls ‘whore school’, when Dominika uses her come-hither nakedness to humiliate a male recruit — another would-be rapist.
BUT we first meet Dominika in very different circumstances, as prima ballerina with the Bolshoi Ballet. Her dancing career ends traumatically when, during a performance, her male counterpart lands not very Nijinskily (an adverb that I don’t think exists, but should) on her ankle.
This means the Bolshoi will no longer house her and her disabled mother ( Joely richardson), or pay her beloved mum’s medical bills.
Dominika badly needs a new income stream and her late father’s brother, sinister uncle Ivan (Matthias schoenaerts), has just the job for her. she will become a sparrow.
By now, we know that Dominika has a ruthless — not to say borderline psychopathic — side because we’ve seen her exact revenge, in the steamiest of steam rooms, on the chap who smashed her leg.
we also know that her new career will bring her into contact with a CIA operative called Nate Nash ( Joel Edgerton), who has been cultivating a mole in the russian secret service.
Nate has been brusquely summoned back to the states for blowing his cover as a ‘handler’ in Moscow, but he convinces his superiors to let him head back East on the basis that his valuable contact will talk to nobody but him.
Dominika’s job is to catch his eye in Budapest and seduce him into revealing the mole’s identity.
Nate is destined to become a handler in more ways than one. But first, Dominika has to be taught the tricks of her new trade as a temptress.
Moscow’s principal spymaster (Jeremy Irons, no less) needs convincing that she’s up to it, but uncle Ivan, who creepily seems to rather fancy his niece, has already sent her into a honeytrap situation from which she emerged with flying colours.
she seems certain to graduate summa cum laude
from Sparrow School, which is run by an unsmiling woman known as Matron, played with Siberian chilliness by Charlotte Rampling.
‘You must inure yourself to what you find repellent,’ says Matron, instructing her charges in the art of oral sex.
It could have been at this juncture that I imagined a little snort from beyond the grave from the woman I will personally always think of as the one and only Matron — the late Hattie Jacques, .
Of course, Red Sparrow is not a film to be taken at all irreverently. It is a serious movie based on a serious novel of the same name (by former CIA officer Jason Matthews). But it does encourage at least some sniggering in the stalls.
This owes something to the decision to let British and American actors affect Russian accents — always a risk — which leads to a vortex of confusion when a colleague of Dominika’s, played by Douglas Hodge, briefly drops the Russian accent with which he has been speaking to other Russians throughout the movie, to speak actual Russian, which is subtitled.
Hodge, who some of you will remember as rather a dish in his younger days, is here cast as Moscow’s sweaty, overweight, faintly repulsive spy chief in Budapest.
He follows Dominika to London on an entertaining, if mystifying, tangent from the main narrative, concerning a U. S. senator’s alcoholsodden chief- of- staff (MaryLouise Parker) who is feeding top- secret information to the Russians. ALL
this might sound convoluted, yet the convolutions have barely begun. Mostly they concern Dominika’s true allegiance and, indeed, with the end of the film finally nigh, we’re still not sure which side she is really on.
But another uncertainty bugged me long after the final credits, and it’s this: is a film in which the female lead is taught how to submit to rape and perform sex acts on men, by way of service to her (maleled) state, about the empowerment of women, about the moral depravity of the Kremlin, or about base titillation?
I know what director Francis Lawrence and his namesake star would say, but I think I might beg to differ.