‘Red Sparrow’ Complicates the Politics of Sex and Consent

Gutsy female athlete making risky—if questionable—life decisions to maintain power over her life seems to be the recurring theme of this season’s awards show darlings, from “I, Tonya” to “Molly’s Game.” For the #MeToo era, which has sparked a national dialogue on power and consent, the plot is fitting: A woman dares to exist in the world of men.

Now, “Red Sparrow,” a Russian spy thriller, joins that list. Director Francis Lawrence creates the trust-nobody paranoia synonymous with the lore of the Russian intelligence network, particularly topical amid real-life reports of Russian intervention in the U.S. presidential election.

Here, the gutsy female athlete is Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence, with a somewhat believable Slavic accent), a Russian prima ballerina who suffers a career-ending injury. Vanya (Matthias Schoenaerts), her unnervingly affectionate uncle and the head of the SVR, pressures her to protect her ailing mother. Dominika trains as a Sparrow, a professional femme fatale who uses sex and psychological manipulation to procure information for the government. But when Dominika falls in love with Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), an American target, she complicates her political allegiance and risks her own life. “Red Sparrow” boasts a dynamic female lead with acting prowess, but it’s not enough to keep it aloft. A convoluted plot and botched love story force the film to crash-land.

While initially simple, the film’s plot quickly devolves into an incomprehensible mesh of geopolitical turmoil. After the death of a U.S. senator, the chronology of events spirals into confusion, and it becomes unclear who’s on whose side and who’s spying on whom. There’s betrayal, deception, subterfuge—but why? And for whom? Perhaps it was too ambitious to convey all the details of the source material, Jason Matthews’s 2013 novel of the same name. At any rate, Justin Haythe’s screenplay leaves room for gratuitous gore, including several attempted rapes, brutal torture methods, and a particularly harrowing scene involving a skin-grafting blade.

While Dominika’s depth of emotion sometimes flattens into a hard stare, it’s heartening to see Lawrence play a more dimensional character than the one she played last September, in “mother!”—Darren Aronofsky’s pseudo-intellectual global warming allegory. For an actress whose private photos were cruelly leaked four years ago, playing a seductress wielding her sexuality as a tool of power and manipulation represents a particularly brave (and symbolic) choice: a reclamation of bodily autonomy. From the moment that Dominika attacks the saboteurs responsible for her injury, to the film’s genuinely surprising, albeit torturously delayed twist ending, it’s increasingly obvious that Lawrence’s character calls all the shots. Dominika’s power spans the range of brute force (a ferocious retaliation with a broken shower faucet against an attempted rapist, a bloody knife fight to the death) to deception and strategizing as a double, then triple, then quadruple agent. And Lawrence, in an array of different cocktail dresses and cut-out swimsuits, masks Dominika’s ingenuity under ingenuousness, sometimes with frightening facility. In one scene, Dominika takes a picture with a predatory benefactor, the camera flash illuminating the vacancy of her glazed eyes: a blank canvas onto which men project their own desires and fantasies. “Every human being is a puzzle of need,” Matron (Charlotte Rampling), a teacher at Sparrow School, tells her. “You must become the missing piece, and they will tell you everything.”

Still, as the story unfolds, the sexual politics of Dominika’s career enter murky territory. It’s difficult to view uncritically as a feminist narrative, when a substantial portion of Dominika’s screen-time is spent on her torture and near-rape. It’s unclear whether her nudity implies objectification or self-ownership, whether she initiates sex because she desires it or because she needs it to achieve objectives that her uncle has effectively forced on her. Even the film’s title implies a fraught dichotomy: “red” signals violence, blood, and passion, but “sparrow” suggests meekness, flightiness.

It’s too bad that Edgerton can’t quite match her pace. Lawrence’s solo performance demotes the love story, supposedly central to the story, to a mere subplot—if that. The scenes between Edgerton and Lawrence lack chemistry, much less romance. As U.S. intelligence agent Nate Nash, Edgerton dodges a few bullets and fights a few bad guys, but his main storyline consists of swimming at the Hungarian YMCA and sitting in a hotel room waiting for Dominika to finish her mission. When he promises Dominika he’ll do “everything in [his] power” to protect her, it feels like not just an empty promise, but a pointless one. After all, what is his power next to hers?

—Staff writer Caroline A. Tsai can be reached at caroline.tsai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @carolinetsai3.