Sparrow School

Friday I am in London for work and then Saturday, L does Forest Rec Parkrun while I rest my legs and exercise the dogs. Although with just two weeks to go until the London Landmarks Half Marathon, I do desperately need a training run. So on Sunday the honour falls on the Fradley 10K. It’s ideal really, it’s quite local and easy to get to. It may be two loops but beggars can’t be choosers.

L has done it before. She says she remembers getting lettuce and a Florette face flannel in her goody bag. We’ll be hoping for something more useful this year then.

It goes relatively well. 46:06 isn’t great but it isn’t a disaster either. They have bacon sandwiches and the Lad has a great time.

In the evening we go see Red Sparrow, a spy thriller which has attracted a lot criticism. This allegedly perverse ‘15’ certificate film has been accused of being both violently and sexually perverse with woman beaten and raped seemingly at will by powerful men. 

Perhaps I need to re-watch it to see what I missed but I do remember they’d left out the hair brush scene (thankfully). That would have caused even more of a stir.

The story goes like this. Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) was a ballerina at the Bolshoi whose promising dancing career was ended by injury. Sadly her dancing also funded the care for her ailing mother.

Not to worry, her uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts), who works in Russian intelligence, offers her work to help her get by. It is just a small favour he requires, for her to be the honey in a trap that is to be sprung on a Russian politician. She does the favour and does a rather good job, although it probably goes a little bit further than she would have hoped. Then just as the politician is having his way with her, he is murdered.

Unfortunately she’s now in a bit of a pickle because she’s seen too much. She is told she can either die or start working for Russian intelligence herself. Tough choice that.

So her uncle sends her off to Sparrow School where Matron (Charlotte Rampling) teaches the recruits to use the skills of sexual seduction to get what they want from the enemy.

Once graduated, Dominika is sent to Budapest to meet her target, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who works for the CIA and knows the identity of a Russian mole known as Marble. However, Nash quickly sees through her and the long and short of it is that he persuades her to become a double agent.

I was a fan of the book even though it was at times convoluted and hard to follow, so a simplification was required for it to work as a film and that doesn't happen. In fact what we have here is an even more convoluted plot.

The other problem is where is the seduction? There’s a total lack of chemistry between the two agents. For someone supposedly trained in seduction, Dominika doesn’t pull any tricks out of the locker for him. In the book they have a conflicted relationship due to the nature of their jobs but a relationship nonetheless, here they eventually have a quick bonk. It's not quite the same and where was the swimming race? That was one of my favourite bits.

Instead the script seems to demand that all the Russians must be portrayed as ice men and ice maidens. So Lawrence goes through the entire film wearing only one expression, one of indifference, while Edgerton goes about attempting to be the all American hero.

In fact Lawrence seems hugely miscast in this but then so too are the likes of Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons, Joely Richardson and Ciaran Hinds. Were there no genuine Russian actors available the weekend that they did the casting?

There is also no back story to the Russian mole which was pivotal to the original story, instead the film just seems overloaded with violence. It’s all deeply disappointing.

This would have made a wonderful independent flick or even a mini series but Hollywood completely wrecked this one.

(Sunday 11^th March)

German Time

Today we head off to near Burton where L has entered the Fradley 10k. It’s a two lap course, which is good for spectators, if a bit dull for the runners, and the bacon butties aren’t bad either.

I offer to buy the post-race Sunday lunch before realising its Mother’s Day and therefore the chance of getting one would be highly remote. Instead we visit my mother and hand over something chocolaty.

In the evening we eat at Broadway, drink the Centurion and see a film. 

 Suite Française is an adaptation of an incomplete novel by Ukrainian-Jew Irène Némirovsky who died in Auschwitz in 1942.

France has fallen to the Nazis and the whole country is in disarray. There has been a mass exodus from Paris and in Bussy the refugees arrive in their masses. These are soon followed by a regiment of German soldiers who take control, bark orders, impose 'German time' and billet themselves with the locals.

Madame Angellier (Kristin Scott Thomas), a landlord and part-time extortionist (from her tenants) is horrified to have the jackbooted officer Bruno von Falk (Matthias Schoenaerts) as an enforced house guest. Her daughter-in-law Lucile (Michelle Williams) doesn’t really know what to think except what Madame Angellier tells her to.

Lucile is a quiet and repressed young girl with a peculiar absence of anything substantial to her character. Yes I know there's a war on but FFS smile girl. Her husband is a prisoner of war in Germany, not that she’s really that bothered where he is. They’re not close.

Generally the villagers’ feelings towards their invaders are mixed. The local women, starved of male scenery, drool at the strapping soldiers in their midst and many like Celine (Margot Robbie) have no qualms about sleeping with the enemy. For others it is a chance to settle old scores and for the local Viscount (Lambert Wilson) it’s about organising picnics with their conquerors. Farmhand Benoît Labarie (Sam Riley) thinks his billeted officer Kurt Bonnet (Tom Schilling) wants to get his hands on his wife (Ruth Wilson), so he kills him.

Lucille meanwhile would just really really like to play the piano but it’s banned until her bloody husband comes home. When their German lodger unlocks Madame Angellier’s piano and plays poignant melodies on it he seems to have also stumbled across the key to unlocking the dreary Lucile as well. Her dreariness dissolves significantly when she realises that he’s a music lover too, that is when he isn’t carrying out executions in the town’s square. Suddenly her character is transformed and she briefly becomes a passionate minx.

All this happens with no language problems at all. The multilingual Germans speak real German to each other and then French (presumably, voiced in English) to everyone else. Impressive.

It’s mainly a love story but not a very riveting one. Boy invades girl’s village. Boy isn't as horrid as girl first thought. Girl falls in love with boy.

War wise, the opening scenes capture well the chaos that followed the Nazi invasion but the film is only superficially about the struggle to survive the German occupation. Many of the scenes just simply don't ring true as to how things would have actually happened in an occupied town.

Afterwards we visit a deserted Barrel Drop and the Hand and Heart.

 

(Sunday 15^th March)