“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.
After graduating with a first, young Joan (Sophie Cookson) gets a job on a top-secret research project, but only as an assistant. Her role is to type and file. Her expertise comes as a bonus – as does her beauty. Joan’s creepy nuclear scientist boss stumbles over the mental gymnastics required to compliment a woman on both her brains and her looks, calling her “not not a pretty face”. The socialist contacts Joan picked up in her undergrad years are the surprise that the dolts in this lab almost deserve.
Most of the fun in Red Joan comes from such overthrown expectations, so it’s a shame that the film itself fails to overwhelm – mostly proceeding along dully familiar lines and anything but radical. The script is adapted from a novel by Jennie Rooney, itself inspired by the true story of Melita Norwood, a KGB source known as the “granny spy” when she was unmasked in the late 90s. Joan is a far more timid traitor, though, motivated less by a zeal for communism than a very British instinct for decency and fair play.
Dench plays her brilliantly in old age, of course, coming the doddery innocent with the cops for as long as she can stand it. Cookson gives a fine account of herself in the earlier sequences, as the shy student seduced but not quite radicalised at Cambridge by Leo (Tom Hughes), a Russian Jew and a socialist fireband. The flashback scenes are repetitive though, with Joan stoutly resisting the lures of her “comrades”, followed by yet another montage and a useful newsreel or two to fill in the historical gaps. Leo is a shifty, cold lover, and a devoutly earnest commie, but a believable enough type. Too many of the other characters here are stock ones, though, photocopied from old newspapers, such as Sonya (Tereza Srbova), a glamorous but steely KGB operative who cavorts in Joan’s mink, or William (Freddie Gaminara), who glides from the JCR to the Foreign Office while concealing both his Soviet allegiance and his Indian boyfriend.
The present-day scenes are largely confined to the police station: all fairly stodgy, except when Dench’s face flickers with the thrill of recalling her misdemeanour. Back in the past, the sludgy greys and browns of wartime Cambridge pall rapidly. A trip across the ocean to Canada offers nothing more than an indifferently drawn digital war fleet, and an icky escalation of Joan’s relationship with Max, her stammering boss at the atom bomb lab (Stephen Campbell Moore). This suppressed affair (he’s married, of course) leads to more pouting than passion, and although it sets the scene for the film’s well-signalled denouement, that is hardly an advantage. The ease with which Joan betrays her country is matched only by the ease with which she gets away with it for so long. Her get-out-of-jail-free plan is both sleazy and implausible.
For a story in which millions of lives are at stake, Red Joan is maddeningly cosy. As the posh plotters clatter their teacups in front of the gas fire, the tension dissipates; in this bland retelling, Red Joan’s arrest hardly seems worth the paperwork.
•Red Joan was screening at the Toronto film festival, and is due for UK release in April 2019.
