I believe it was the great Russian writer Chekhov who famously said if a photograph of a same-sex kiss appears in a film about espionage, it must be used for extortion later. This latter character is uncredited in the film, suggesting a profound disinterest in the internationalist dimensions of Communism and the weirdly colonialist dimensions of a foreign minister carrying on with a presumably anti-Colonial radical. Joan tucks the photo into her purse, the latter of which might be a legitimate contender for best supporting actor, so often is it called upon to squirrel away critical plot points. At a key point in the film, Joan unearths a photograph of Mitchell entangled in a deep kiss with his Communist lover. Mitchell goes on to assume a high-powered position in the British foreign office, all while maintaining, incongruously, deep connections to the Communist Party and the Soviet Union. When she is a student at Cambridge, Joan meets William Mitchell, a leader in the Communist film society who is close to a male Indian comrade. In this regard, the film seems itself to be as uncomprehending and unimaginative as the role in which Dench is stiflingly confined. Perhaps most surprising in the film, however – and perhaps the only surprising thing in this entire cinematic disaster – is Red Joan’s bizarre treatment of homosexuality and Communism.
Even Judi Dench cannot create dramatic tension here, mostly because she appears on screen in only a few scenes following her arrest in 2000 and primarily to trigger an unanchored series of flashbacks from her character’s radical past. It is most impressive that a film dealing with such hot themes can be so maddeningly dull. I will not dwell here on the clunky filmic device that requires Dench to repeatedly stare wistfully beyond the camera as she is transported back to a 1938 rally for the Spanish Civil War, a dusty Communist film screening at Cambridge University, and a number of Cinemax-level bedspread-shrouded sex scenes. Norwood is reimagined as Joan Stanley, secretary to an atomic scientist who, in her doddering old age, is visited by MI5 and carted off to an interrogation room where she repeatedly falls into tight-lipped reverie as she recalls her recruitment into the high-stakes world of international espionage during World War II. The film, based on a novel by Jennie Rooney, offers a fictional take on the story of Melita Norwood, a British woman who engaged in spycraft that assisted in the development of Soviet atomic weapons. Mode famously sang in a song that plays in my head whenever Dench appears on Her voice were an option on my sound machine, I’d fall asleep to it. Narrative take on the history of global technologies, but I would be lying. IĬould tell you I’d never taken an extra spin on EPCOT’s SpaceshipĮarth just to spend another seven minutes hypnotized by Dench’s dry Ordinariness with layers of hidden depth has made her into a queer icon. Whom also, more please) but Dench’s unique ability to balance norm-core
They might not all be Notes on a Scandal, the 2006 film whereĭench played a barely-repressed lesbian creepily seeking the affection of a
As every good homosexual knows, there is no such thing as bad