SHE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE (RADIOACTIVE)

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Polish born but French based Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize.

And then she won it again.

A physicist and chemist, she and her husband, Pierre were acclaimed for their pioneering work on radioactivity with the physicist Henri Becquerel.

This landed them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

Eight years later, Marie would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for discovering two elements, polonium and radium.


A scientist whose discoveries had a profound impact on future generations, she overcame sexism in her native Poland and in her adopted homeland of France.

So it is fair to say Marie Curie's life is tailor made for biopics and that has happened more than once.

Greer Carson landed an Oscar nomination for playing her opposite Walter Pidgeon in Mervyn LeRoy's well received 1943 biopic 'Marie Curie'.

Kate Trotter also depicted her in the 1997 made for TV film 'Marie Curie: More Than Meets the Eye,' while in the same year Isabelle Huppert took on the role of the great scientist in Claude Pinoteau's 'Les Palmes de M Schutz'.

Marie Noelle's Polish backed French language feature 'Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge' in 2016 cast Karolina Gruszka as the double Nobel winner.

This year, English actress Rosamund Pike entered the fray.

She did so with the help of Iranian-born French director and graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi and the prolific screenwriter Jack Thorne.

'Radioactive' focusses mostly on Curie's life in Paris in the 1890s.

At the start of the film, though, Satrapi and Thorne give us the first of several glimpses into the future as Pike's 66 year-old version of Curie collapses in her laboratory and is taken to hospital.

Going back to the 1890s, we follow her clashes in Paris as Marie Sklodowska with the scientific establishment - personified by Simon Russell Beale's physicist Gabriel Lippman.

She has a chance encounter on the street with Sam Riley's Pierre Curie and again while watching a dancer perform.

Impressed by her intelligence, Pierre seeks to recruit her as a colleague but her prickly nature and her determination to stand only on her own achievements mean this is not an easy sell.

He succeeds by showing her his laboratory and soon not only are they working together but end up marrying.

Together they make a huge scientific breakthrough with the discovery of polonium and radium.

This will ultimately lead to the development of radioactive treatments for battling cancer.

And they will also have two daughters before tragedy strikes and Marie finds herself in the eye of a storm over her extra marital affair with Aneurin Barnard's Paul Langevin, a colleague.

Shot in dark palettes by Anthony Dod Mantle, 'Radioactive' is a visually striking film that sometimes recalls the Parisian scenes of Renoir and Degas.  

It features a fierce central performance from Pike as Marie Curie who accentuates her character's spiky side.

Pike dominates proceedings with Riley and Barnard very much playing second fiddle to her.

Although there is an eye catching performance from Katherine Parkinson as Langevin's betrayed wife Emma Jeanne Defosses.

There is sturdy support from Sian Brooke as Marie's sister Bronia Sklodowska, Simon Russell Beale as Lippmann, Tim Woodward as the French politician Alexandre Millerand and Anya Taylor Joy as the Curies' daughter Irene.

Satrapi is also very effective in drawing out the sexism that Curie had to battle and in shining a light on the tensions of balancing an accomplished career with raising a family.

If there is a flaw, it is that the film rather gauchely hammers home the impact of Curie's discoveries for good and for ill.

Satrapi and Thorne rather jarringly punctuate episodes in her life with recreations of a boy receiving chemotherapy, the Enola Gay's dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the testing of nuclear weapons and the Chernobyl disaster.

Most people know what Curie's discoveries were and what they led to.

It seems unnecessarily clunky and lacking in confidence for Satrapi to include these in the narrative.

However despite this, Satrapi has created a handsome and substantial biopic which would make an interesting double bill with Wash Westmoreland's 'Colette' whose look also drew inspiration from the paintings of Degas, Renoir and Monet.

Covering some similar territory, it stands up very favourably to Westmoreland's film and that is largely down to the work of Dod Mantle and Pike.

Their contributions make 'Radioactive' time well spent.

('Radioactive' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on June 15, 2020 and was made available on DVD and for streaming on July 27, 2020)






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