Dench is a pensioner pulled up for her wartime sympathies in a stodgy espionage drama that can’t disguise its mediocrity“No one suspects us because we’re women,” smiles one feminine conspirator to another in Trevor Nunn’s wartime spy drama Red Joan. Never mind all the espionage and atomic physics, this movie is really about the dangers of underestimating women. Our Joan is patronised in two different eras of her life, both as the pensioner charged with treason and as a demure Cambridge scientist in the 1940s, who slips nuclear secrets to the Soviets on the sly.The older Joan, played all too briefly by Judi Dench, is a retired and softly spoken librarian apparently engrossed in watercolours and gardening. Her friends, neighbours and even her adult sonare flabbergasted when the police come knocking. Surely the old dear can’t have snow on her boots? These dopes haven’t clocked her Che Guevara coffee mug. As the police interrogate her, flashbacks take us back to her youth as a susceptible student, singled out by conniving communists at a screening of Battleship Potemkin. Continue reading…
Via: Red Joan review – Judi Dench's 'granny spy' brings OAP to the KGB
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