Jennifer Lawrence is back again in another role in which Hollywood objectifies women. Lawrence seems to have accepted her fate as an actress: she is a woman who is asked to give and give and give until she can’t do it anymore. The trailer shows her sitting on a bed in a night red dress with a drink on her hand. She is obviously waiting for a man. We don’t see him. We only see him placing a mobile phone and money clip on the bedside table. His next move is an order: “Take off your dress”.
Well, that is hardly acceptable nowadays, and so the trailer quickly notes she is in control. Lawrence is a young officer trained to seduce and manipulate. Her trainer is Charlotte Rampling, We hear the Australian actor Joel Edgerton (from Jeff Nichols’s Loving, 2017) say in the voice-over: “she uses her body” in order to attract men and kill them. She is what they call a Sparrow, or a spy. And indeed we realise that from the first clip that she is probably feigning her vulnerability. Next, she kills and puts on a wig in order to flee the crime scene (by the way, speculation around the natural colour of her hair is a recurrent topic on the internet; the wig is certain to stoke this profound and colourful discussion).
But the story is seen from the perspective of Joel Edgerton’s character, who happens to be a CIA spy. Hence, the audience tends to agree with him and be on his side. He is the right guy. And Lawrence chose the wrong side, as she is Russian. This highly Manichaean spy tale promises to show breathtaking Jennifer Lawrence mastering what she does best: an uncensored inability to be a cheat.
Despite sharing the surname with the sexy actor in red, the director Francis Lawrence is not related to her!
Red Sparrow will be released theatrically in early March.
