Red Sparrow

The novel was the first book by Jason Matthews, who spent thirty three years in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and retired in 2010, publishing it in 2013. Justin Haythe’s screenplay leaves out two things: the synaesthesia that lets the novel’s Dominika read people as coloured haloes, and Putin. Losing it sets the temperature. On the page Dominika can see what a room is feeling; on screen she cannot, so audience and character are blind together and who is running whom stays open across 140 minutes. The opening ballet was really danced. Jennifer Lawrence trained for four months, Justin Peck made the choreography, and American Ballet Theatre principal Isabella Boylston doubled the footwork. The cutting rule was strict: if Boylston was in plié, Lawrence had to be in plié; when Boylston rose onto pointe, Lawrence went to demi pointe. Francis Lawrence shot it in Budapest’s Hungarian State Opera House before roughly a thousand people. James Newton Howard’s score leans on Stravinsky’s Firebird, so the thing Dominika loses in the first ten minutes keeps returning in the music. A good fit if you accept espionage staged in the Sparrow School classrooms and the interrogation room rather than the field. Not for anyone who does not want sexual violence on screen; the training passages present it at length, like a lesson.