The most interesting scene of Red Sparrow could also be its most problematic. Jennifer Lawrence has just stripped off all her clothes and hopped onto a desk in front of a classroom of people. A day earlier, one of her classmates attempted to rape her in the shower, and now he’s standing before her. This is an invitation. But he can’t get it up. “Power, that’s what he wants,” she says.
It’s a line that speaks volumes in the post-Weinstein, #metoo era. And if this were The Handmaid’s Tale, it might just work. Lawrence’s line comes as part of a class in which Russian spies are trained as “sparrows” to use their bodies and sexuality to manipulate their marks. Charlotte Rampling leads the class in which young women and men are asked to give blow jobs and study their own sex tapes. “Your body belongs to the state,” Rampling says. “Now it asks something in return.”
It’s almost laughable, and it’s hard to swallow (forgive the euphemism) within a movie that wants to be about female empowerment and survival. But I’d trade much more of this bizarre, questionable sex boot camp for the convoluted and conventional spy thriller Red Sparrow becomes.
Lawrence plays Dominika, one of Russia’s prima-ballerinas whose career is cut short by a horrible injury that turns out not to be an accident. In order to care for her mother, she agrees to take a job set by her uncle Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts, looking like a spitting image of a young Putin). When the job goes wrong and the mark is assassinated, Dominika is forced to become an agent of the state or be killed. Her new target is an American CIA agent (Joel Edgerton) who is protecting a mole within the Russian government.
It’s numerous layers of espionage mystery, with double agents and Dominika playing to both sides, but she never appears to be the mastermind the film would like for her to be. It’s more convoluted than intricate, and those sexual manipulation strengths she learns early on don’t come back to aid her later.
Even The Hunger Games movies, which Red Sparrow director Francis Lawrence also worked with J-Law on, convey more in terms of male and female power dynamics than this film does. Lawrence has borrowed the look of opulent Soviet era dramas and none of the style. His best scene might be Dominika sneaking into a steamy sauna to get revenge on the couple that conspired to end her dancing career. It’s erotic and cloaked in fog, but Lawrence later opts for scenes of torture and violent interrogation rather than stealthy or suspenseful spy games.
Even Jennifer Lawrence delivers a frustratingly muted performance, laboring through a Russian accent and never giving an ounce of spark or crazed energy she displayed in the far more provocative story of how women are manipulated, last year’s Mother!
It’s frustrating for a movie with such bizarre promise and thorny sexual politics to ultimately be weighed down by something that couldn’t even begin to be called sexy.
2 ½ stars