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Radioactive

By | July 21st, 2020
Posted in Movies, Reviews | % Comments

“Persepolis” creator Marjane Satrapi’s latest film, Radioactive, stars Rosamund Pike as pioneering French physicist/chemist Marie Curie, and releases on Amazon Prime Video on Friday, July 24. Based on Lauren Redniss’s 2010 graphic novel “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout,” it is a bafflingly chaotic portrayal of Curie’s life that somehow still manages to remain a paint-by-numbers biopic.

The film opens with Curie dying in 1934, and proceeds to cycle through her prior life, from meeting her husband Pierre (Sam Riley), to her affair with Paul Langevin (Aneurin Barnard), and her work with her daughter Irène (Anya Taylor-Joy), bringing x-rays to the Western Front during World War I. As you might’ve surmised from that, the film wheels through her life, rarely rising above the same level of substance as a series of bullet points on a classroom whiteboard — for example, Curie was Polish by birth, but we never hear her and her sister (Bronia Sklodowska, played by Sian Brooke) speak the language, while her Catholic background is only mentioned once.

Satrapi and screenwriter Jack Thorne appear primarily interested in the cosmic significance of Curie’s research, which we know is important because we’re told that over and over again in a series of mindnumbing speeches that it will change the world. Well aware the audience could lose interest or remain unconvinced, the filmmakers punctuate these with visual displays of atomic structures and rays; and then by taking sharp turns into the surreal, with vivid flashforwards to the future, depicting the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, the nuclear testings in Nevada, and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Despite being unsubtle and absolutely out-of-place, these vignettes offer surprisingly spectacular distractions from the tedious, cliched presentation of Curie’s relationships and her struggle for recognition. Still, they should’ve been excised entirely to free up cash for the sound mixing, which is extraordinarily bad for a prestige picture: there are numerous instances where the dialogue crackles with distortion, indicating there was no rerecording during post-production, an appalling decision that completely ruins any illusion we might have that we’re watching Curie’s memories, instead of the cast on location.

It adds to the strange gloss the film has: Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is as realistic and moody as any modern film set in the age of gas light, but it’s also overly bright, rendering everything strangely weightless — the dirt and spilling liquid in Curie’s lab appear to be as artificial as the visual effects. Despite the hair and make-up, Curie always seems to be the same age, contributing to the theatrical atmosphere — as competent as Pike is, casting another actress as the elderly version of her would’ve been more convincing (just as Taylor-Joy doesn’t play the younger Irène).

Perhaps part of the problem is how unconventional Redniss’s book was: it was a graphic novel, but not a comic book, in the sense that it lacked panels or word balloons — it was an illustrated stream-of-consciousness, that may have been better suited as an animated film, or a one-woman play. It’s strange how, since helming the animated film version of “Persepolis” with Vincent Paronnaud, Satrapi has only directed live-action films (and apparently moved away from comics, for that matter): it seems she was trying to push the conventions of a biopic, but has sadly only left us with the impression that Curie’s life was not interesting on its own.

It feels cheap to criticize someone’s work by comparing it to something superior, just as it would be to praise art by blasting something inferior, but I couldn’t help but remember another film about a woman and her passion for her subject; Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire (which is actually in French, no less). It is one of the slowest films I have ever seen, but it never becomes as tiresome as the hectic Radioactive — it luxuriates in depicting its protagonist in the act of creation, while Radioactive skims over Curie’s dedication to her lab work, deeming it something unimportant next to the impact her work had.

Radioactive doesn’t need to be as sedate as Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but it reminds us that very few biopics do justice to their subjects by cramming their lives into two hours: any of Curie’s relationships could’ve been the focus of a beautiful film, but here they’re a disjointed sequence of events. Satrapi covered her own early life in the four volumes of “Persepolis” from 2000 to 2003; perhaps she should’ve done something similar. Ultimately, Radioactive is a work of style-over-substance, that shows us Curie was important, but fails to make us feel it in our bones. She deserves better, and so do you.


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Christopher Chiu-Tabet

Chris is the news manager of Multiversity Comics. A writer from London on the autistic spectrum, he enjoys tweeting and blogging on Medium about his favourite films, TV shows, books, music, and games, plus history and religion. He is Lebanese/Chinese, although he can't speak Cantonese or Arabic.

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