Red Sparrow Film Review
Gratuity is the point.
Red Sparrow probably came out at the wrong time. A movie with bodily exploitation as its central theme isn’t going to sit well during a massive industry shake-up, in which decades-long abuse of female filmmakers is finally, publicly, being taken seriously. Even more unsettling is the central performance from Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence, whose Hunger Games (2012 – 2015) franchise established her as an icon for empowerment among young women.
Both female and male critics have been unimpressed with director Francis Lawrence’s take on the novel by Jason Matthews, in which an ex-ballerina is dehumanised in service of the state. April Wolfe with The Village Voice reduces the film to ‘a lifeless peepshow’, while Luke Buckmaster hated the film, writing in the Daily Review that ‘the director lurches from titillation to grotesquery’. The film flirts with a nihilistic representation of a spy’s life, pulling no punches when it comes to violence and torture, bordering on gleeful exploitation and a miserable worldview. It’s likely to offend— exploitation movies always do. It’d be a shame, then, if Red Sparrow’s tremendous visual impact and its career-best performance from J. Lawrence were dismissed because the time wasn’t right.
Image via theindependent.co.uk
Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova, a ballerina forced to retire early due to an injury she sustains onstage. A male performer lands on her leg and we hear the sickening crack as her leg bends backwards. Egorova gasps and the performance stops short. Floating up to the roof, the camera holds her bent leg and distraught face squarely in frame.
This, and the later shot of her surgery, are the first of many gratuitous shots, but the screenplay by Justin Haythe and F. Lawrence’s lingering camera work show that this is a pointless criticism to lob at the film. In the same way Nicolas Winding Refn’s lavish setpieces and sordid themes are ludicrous, or that Michael Haneke’s lecturing in Funny Games is relentless, Red Sparrow’s wince-inducing opener and its grandiloquent production design (Maria Djurkovic) make things clear: gratuity is the point.
Image via popzara.com
Without the money from her dancing, Egorova is going to lose the government’s support for her sick mother (Joely Richardson). A lecherous uncle (Matthias Schoenaerts) shows up in their shabby apartment and offers the ex-dancer another option. She is to seduce a wealthy political figure in a bar, which results in an attempted rape and the man’s murder, as he’s strangled to death by an unknown assailant. The man dies on top of Dominika mid-thrust, as she stares into the eyes of her attacker.
Following the attack, J. Lawrence plays Egorova by holding the audience at a constant distance, while still managing to draw them in to her painful and humiliating experiences. In the same way she achieved empathy for a nameless character in mother! (2017), here she is mysterious and hardened, yet, as an observer, you endure what she endures. How J. Lawrence does this is a mystery, though it’s what has made her choices post-Hunger Games (and early on in Winter’s Bone) so intelligent and intriguing.
Egorova is sent to a spy academy to be trained as a Red Sparrow, i.e. using seduction to gain information. Speeches from the Matron (Charlotte Rampling) detail the ways in which bodies (both female and male) are used to become tools for the state. Students are ordered to strip in front of the class, perform oral sex, and a student who attempts to rape Egorova in the shower before she beats him with the tap, are all aggressively demonstrative of the film’s points, reminiscent of the soldiers’ dehumanisation in Full Metal Jacket (1987). They’re effective as much as they are uncomfortable.
Image via grandcinemas.com.au
When Egorova is pulled out of what she refers to as ‘whore school’ for a mission, the film’s spy plot takes over. It’s a twisty tale of double-crosses and unclear motives as Egorova moves between working for the US and for Russia, while striking up an unclear relationship with US operative Nate Nash. We only have Egorova’s face to trust, as well as the horror she’s been put through, and J. Lawrence keeps us second-guessing ourselves as much as the plot does. Swathes of exposition drag the plot down in parts, and the final reveal is so understated it feels hardly necessary.
Red Sparrow is a faulty film and a pretty nasty one, but it would be wrong to bury it under negative reviews. Critics in their reviews leave no room for a movie with violence as its central theme, as violence had never been part of the reason many of us go to the movies. The difference here is, the violence isn’t pointless or leery, it’s affecting and deeply uncomfortable. The majority of critics would have you believe these are things we should sanitise as much as possible.
