Movie Review : Red Sparrow

One thing that the Cold War gifted movies is the complex intricacies and gritty reality of espionage stories. In espionage thrillers, a recurring ingredient in the tell-the-tale formula is the splicing of storyline set-up scenes involving some operatic performance and a clandestine meeting between a mole and an agent all set to a pulsating incidental orchestral score that eventually hits a suspense-filled crescendo.

That’s pretty much the way Red Sparrow started out. Prima Ballerina, Dominika (Jennifer Lawrence), dressed in a striking red tutu, struts the stage in a grand ballet recital whilst CIA Agent, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton) meets up with a Russian mole in the darkness of a public park. The opening scenes are set to the increasingly pulsating tones of a symphonic score playing in the background.

A jaw-jarring accident set off by a misplaced step by her partner sees Dominika crashing to the stage with a nasty leg injury. The nocturnal meet up in the park goes south with Nate getting arrested by the Russian police. Act 1, Scene 1 ends with your appetite sufficiently whet.

As it turns out, there are no accidents. We create our own fate. Dominika’s partner had created the fate that befell her. She returns the favour in especially brutal terms that redefine coitus interruptus.

With her career as a ballerina effectively over, Dominika soon learns that the perks that come with it have also ceased. Her handicapped mum loses her paid nurse and they might be facing eviction in no distant time.

Help comes in the form of her uncle but there are no free lunches anywhere. Not even from family. He propositions her into a sexual dalliance with a man of interest to Russian Intelligence from whom valuable intel is to be extricated.

Things are bound to go awry and they do ever so brutally. Dominika endures a brutal rape by her target who in turn receives a particularly tragic comeuppance that again redefines coitus interruptus.

Continuing the movie’s viscerally red theme, Dominika is literally bathed in her target’s blood as his life ebbs away with bulging eye balls close to bursting out of their sockets.

When it rains, it pours a crimson deluge. Having witnessed a murder, Dominika is saved from certain death by her uncle’s intervention. To avoid death, she is recruited as a trainee sparrow, an arm of Russian Intelligence trained to extract intel from targets using sexual wiles.

The training regimen for sparrows runs the gamut from intense physical exercise to dehumanizing eroticism. Sparrows are conditioned to see their very beings as state property to be utilized as the occasion demands with not an ounce of resistance.

Her first assignment as a sparrow is to seduce Nash in order to gain information as to who was his mole high up in Russian Intelligence. Her not-so-chance encounter with Nash soon transforms into a romantic (or a simulation of it) relationship which in one defining instance was characterized by an improbable girl-on-top-and-in-control-on-the-couch sexual encounter that culminated with the as yet unheard of notion of a one-minute woman.

As an espionage thriller, the thrill in Red Sparrow was in the dialogue-heavy scenes coupled with the sheer brutality and in-your-face viscerality of its action scenes. Surprisingly, its erotic scenes added layers of gritty impersonality totally devoid of passion rather than eroticism to the overall movie.

Red Sparrow played out slow and methodically building up layers as it progressed, relying on the engaging dialogues to achieve a simulation of reading a page turner espionage novel.

Where others would have relied heavily on action sequences to engage the viewer’s attention, Red Sparrow relied primarily on dialogue bringing in the action sequences intermittently to make a bold and impactful statement.

Where it would have attracted criticism for the seeming sexual dehumanization of females (well, one female really), it turned that on its head by putting her in control of the process.

In the sparrow class where Dominika is asked to submit to the sexual advances of a male classmate who had tried to force himself on her in the showers, she regains control of an otherwise humiliating experience by taunting him into inerection.

In her encounters with Nate and a superior who demanded sexual favours of her, she literally rides one and literally grabs the other by the crotch in turning the table on him.

The movie was not so much sexually exploitative as it was sexually empowering for one who ordinarily should be on the receiving end of exploitation.

The only time Dominika was sexually vulnerable in the movie was in the rape scene with her target early on in the movie. Every other time, she came across as in control of the situation even when the other party thought themselves in control. Even the twist at the end of the movie had her checkmate imprint all over it.

As Dominika, Jennifer Lawrence channeled a grown-up version of her Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise to deliver an ice-cold and passionless character trapped in a men-controlled world of espionage and sexual exploitation.

To take over control of the situation her circumstances had thrust her into, she chose not to stoop to conquer but to stand ramrod straight in defiance and reverse the tables.

While her looks were sufficient enough to pull off a convincing slavic look, her Russian accent wavered noticeably into a recognizable American one in some scenes.

Red Sparrow chose a dialogue-heavy vehicle to tell its intricate tale of espionage that harkened back to the old days of the Cold War, a Russian roulette of deeply invasive and passionless eroticism to further the game of one-upmanship and a brutal barrage of in-your-face violence deliberately spaced out to achieve maximum impact.

It so imbued its perceptive ambience with its titular colour of choice that red is indeed all you can remember when you are done seeing the movie in all its brutality and passionless eroticism.7/10