Heathrow, waiting to catch a plane to Houston, where I will not leave the airport.
Mr Curry decided we should go and see Red Sparrow rather than A Fantastic Woman for reasons which were never entirely clear and the truth is that the movie offers less to get excited about than its ‘hot-under-the-collar’ press would hope. Within ten minutes Mr C had murmured to me “This is an airline movie, right?’ And he was. Any film which has a plot point revolve around floppy disks feels unlikely, introducing a degree of contrivance which undermines even the most far-fetched of narratives. At some point, even though we know we’re watching a Bond-esque fantasy, we need to feel there’s some kind of underpinning in at least a hypothetical truth, and a detail like this seems is so unwieldy that even the most tenuous connection to that hypothetical reality is ruptured and we start to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Which may or may not annoy the filmmakers, who knows. Maybe they don’t care and they’re just laughing all the way to the bank.
What is interesting, however, about Red Sparrow, is its representation of the the American other, in the shape of the Russians. These Russians, are ruthless. They have a devotion to the nebulous idea of the state/ motherland. And, in Red Sparrow, above all else, they are obsessed by sex and its power dynamics, rather than its pleasure dynamics. One can’t help thinking that this is no more than a mirror to the state of US society: that the portrayal offered within the film of the Russians is a way of exploring the concerns and values of the filmmakers themselves. None of which reflects their country in a particularly flattering light.
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