BEFORE: Back on the international spy beat for one more night, then moving on to other topics. Jennifer Lawrence carries over from "The Beaver".
THE PLOT: Ballerina Dominika Egorova is recruited to "Sparrow School", a Russian intelligence service where she is forced to use her body as a weapon. Her first mission, targeting a C.I.A. agent, threatens to unravel the security of both nations.
AFTER: I'm in kind of a strange spot tonight, because I can't help but notice the similarity of this film's first hour to a 1985 TV movie titled "Secret Weapons". In that film, attractive Russian women were recruited to a secret school, where they were forced to undress in front of each other on the first day, then taught over the next few months how to overcome their hang-ups about sex to seduce foreign agents, and their first assignment was to sleep with a group of Russian soldiers on leave, which is filmed by the teachers and watched in class. In "Red Sparrow", attractive Russian women get recruited to a secret school, where they are forced to undress in front of each other on the first day, then taught over the next few months how to overcome their hang-ups about sex to seduce foreign agents, and their first assignment was to sleep with a group of Russian soldiers on leave, which is filmed by the teachers and watched in class. See the resemblance?
Now, I know this film because I watched it on TV back in 1985, and thanks to VCR technology, I was able to watch clips from it again and again. The film starred Geena Davis and Linda Hamilton, and since I was 16 at the time, the scenes made an impression on me, and led to some weird fantasies during high school. When, I wondered, was my English teacher going to make everyone in class stand up and take their clothes off? Sure, that would be embarrassing for me, but at least I'd get to see all the girls in class naked, and things might get more interesting from there. Note: this never happened in real life, which made me wonder why we weren't keeping up with the Soviets in the Cold War teen-sex race. Another note - our screenwriters' secret fantasies about Russian spies have not changed very much since 1985. (The whole film is now on YouTube, check it out if you think I've gone crazy. Linda Hamilton performs a tribute to Irene Cara by having a "Tres Jolie, Coco!" teary-eyed moment as she gets naked in spy class.)
It's worth considering that at the height of the Cold War, this was (apparently) middle America's greatest fear - that Russian women were being trained to seduce our American men, who might be traveling to Moscow on business or on spring break (yeah, right) and once they met these beautiful, unrepressed women who were nothing like the uptight, virginal American daughters that every parent fooled themselves into thinking they had, the men wouldn't be able to control themselves, and then would either start screaming American trade secrets or military codes during sex, or they'd be taken to a Siberian gulag where those secrets would be tortured out of them. It was 1985, Reagan was President, yeah, that all tracks. Speaking of which, did Donald Trump ever visit Moscow during the 1980's? Because this could explain how they first got to him. Two of his wives were models from Eastern Europe, just saying...
But before getting trained as a KGB agent, Dominika is a ballerina, so the formula here is sort of "Black Swan" plus "Black Widow" equals "Red Sparrow", or something like that. An accident at the ballet puts her whole life in jeopardy - her apartment, her mother's health insurance, so her uncle steps up to help her out, by sending her on a mission to seduce a gangster. Gee, thanks, Uncle, but some money would help out a lot better.
Since she's got a knack for this sort of thing, and because she's already seen too much, the only way out is further in, to enroll in spy training. Supposedly she's a natural because she's so good at figuring out what people want, which I didn't realize was as important as cracking codes or wearing disguises or defusing a bomb. But hey, that's Russia for you. And one major difference between Russian spy school in the 80's and today - the seduction classes are now co-ed, and the students have to learn how to seduce their own gender, if need be. Hey, this is what inclusion looks like in a Hollywood spy film - the Russians may have disdain for homosexuals, but they'll engage in that behavior if it gets them some useful intel, apparently.
After a clash with another student who tries to rape her, Dominika is sent to Budapest to get close to an American agent, Nate Nash. She does this by forgoing the fake ID and phony name that the state gave her, and instead checking out the pool at the local gym under her own name, which kind of suggests that she didn't learn much in spy school. Like, lesson number 1 is probably "Don't use your real name", right? But once he figures out that she's a spy, he convinces himself that he can turn her, which will get him the dirt on her uncle. But this also gets her close enough to Nash to try to learn the identity of his mole on the Russian side.
The American agent is a bit of a dope here, like he really believes he can get Dominika to defect, despite the hold that Mother Russia has on her - and her mother. And he knows who she is, and what her training was, so he knows she's been trained to seduce men - and still he believes that he's not being suckered by her. This is what she DOES, she makes you fall for her, and you're nothing special, you're just like all the others, a means to an end, only I guess he's too close to it to see that.
So there's about an hour of "will she or won't she" where we're not quite sure where her loyalties lie, what her endgame is. I'll say this, that the plot did manage to stay one step ahead of me, and as twisty as it was, I really like the way it all wrapped up, except for one point regarding the mole's identity that I can't really talk about, not without blowing it. But if you go back to the Gorky Park scene after the reveal, it doesn't really add up.
Also starring Joel Edgerton (last seen in "Bright"), Matthias Schoenaerts (last seen in "Rust and Bone"), Charlotte Rampling (last seen in "Assassin's Creed"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "Bleed for This"), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Appaloosa"), Joely Richardson (last seen in "Snowden"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Gold"), Mary-Louise Parker (last seen in "The Spiderwick Chronicles"), Thekla Reuten (last seen in "In Bruges"), Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Vanity Fair"), Sakina Jaffrey (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)"), Sergei Polunin (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Sasha Frolova, Sebastian Hülk, Kristof Konrad, Hugh Quarshie, Sergej Onopko, Louis Hoffman.
RATING: 6 out of 10 cryptic phone calls
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