You Do Get To See Jennifer Lawrence Naked, But...
I saw a preview of Red Sparrow in a movie theater quite a few months ago. It looked as slick as The English Patient, as intriguing as a Bond movie. The preview emphasized the time Jennifer Lawrence spends at a special Russian school training to be a spy who uses sexual techniques to achieve victories on behalf of the modern Russian state. Hard to go wrong, right?
Having seen the movie on DVD, I can say that it seems like something out of 1966, like a Cold War espionage film combining heightened reality with a Manichaean view of U.S. versus U.S.S.R. Every Russian character in Red Sparrow speaks in Russian-accented English. For some reason this really bothered me after a while. It was as if the characters, already not developed as believable human beings, further lost their humanity by not speaking their own language, sounding instead like Bond villains of the 1960s.
Jennifer Lawrence plays a ballerina (a stretch to the imagination because her body is just not right for ballet) who gets her leg broken during a performance. Her uncle, whose nose is just like Vladimir Putin's, works for the FSB, the former KGB. He guides her into the life of being a sex spy worker for the state. The school seems to be somewhere in Siberia. Young men and women (Sparrows) are trained in sex techniques, in learning how to lose all shame in relation to their bodies and upbringings. The school, run by Charlotte Rampling (who delivers a cold as ice performance to the extent that I expected a blade to flick out of her shoe), is very clean and well-ordered, contrasting with the likelihood that a student might be called upon on any given day to disrobe in front of class and fuck someone.
I watched the film six days ago. The farther in time I've gotten from it, the more ridiculous it's become in my memory. Torture scenes, murder, characters getting set up, tense music, Budapest, Moscow, London, and who is Jennifer Lawrence truly loyal to and did I even care by the film's conclusion?
What finally got to me (in a bad way) is the film's pro-CIA position. The Russian bad guys are cruel, evil, sons of bitches. The CIA, by contrast, is presented as an enlightened organization trying hard to fight the good fight, rather than as the nation-destroying, coup d'etat-planning, chaos-fomenting thing it really is. An honest Red Sparrow would've left the viewer with a sense of the true dark grayness of situations affected by espionage organizations. Can Jennifer Lawrence trust the FSB? No. Can she trust the CIA? No. What we get, though, is a warm rub on the belly as we find Jennifer pulling for the "right" team.
Hokey garbage, slickly produced, attractive-looking on celluloid, but a piece of shit that might've played better as a satire.
Vic Neptune
I saw a preview of Red Sparrow in a movie theater quite a few months ago. It looked as slick as The English Patient, as intriguing as a Bond movie. The preview emphasized the time Jennifer Lawrence spends at a special Russian school training to be a spy who uses sexual techniques to achieve victories on behalf of the modern Russian state. Hard to go wrong, right?
Having seen the movie on DVD, I can say that it seems like something out of 1966, like a Cold War espionage film combining heightened reality with a Manichaean view of U.S. versus U.S.S.R. Every Russian character in Red Sparrow speaks in Russian-accented English. For some reason this really bothered me after a while. It was as if the characters, already not developed as believable human beings, further lost their humanity by not speaking their own language, sounding instead like Bond villains of the 1960s.
Jennifer Lawrence plays a ballerina (a stretch to the imagination because her body is just not right for ballet) who gets her leg broken during a performance. Her uncle, whose nose is just like Vladimir Putin's, works for the FSB, the former KGB. He guides her into the life of being a sex spy worker for the state. The school seems to be somewhere in Siberia. Young men and women (Sparrows) are trained in sex techniques, in learning how to lose all shame in relation to their bodies and upbringings. The school, run by Charlotte Rampling (who delivers a cold as ice performance to the extent that I expected a blade to flick out of her shoe), is very clean and well-ordered, contrasting with the likelihood that a student might be called upon on any given day to disrobe in front of class and fuck someone.
I watched the film six days ago. The farther in time I've gotten from it, the more ridiculous it's become in my memory. Torture scenes, murder, characters getting set up, tense music, Budapest, Moscow, London, and who is Jennifer Lawrence truly loyal to and did I even care by the film's conclusion?
What finally got to me (in a bad way) is the film's pro-CIA position. The Russian bad guys are cruel, evil, sons of bitches. The CIA, by contrast, is presented as an enlightened organization trying hard to fight the good fight, rather than as the nation-destroying, coup d'etat-planning, chaos-fomenting thing it really is. An honest Red Sparrow would've left the viewer with a sense of the true dark grayness of situations affected by espionage organizations. Can Jennifer Lawrence trust the FSB? No. Can she trust the CIA? No. What we get, though, is a warm rub on the belly as we find Jennifer pulling for the "right" team.
Hokey garbage, slickly produced, attractive-looking on celluloid, but a piece of shit that might've played better as a satire.
Vic Neptune
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