I’m “biast” (con): nothing
(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)
You’ve heard of Marie Curie. She did something with radium and won some Nobel Prizes and stuff, right? But did you also know that she took lots of sexy baths and liked to lounge around naked contemplating her affair with her married lover? It’s true!
We may presume that in all those movies about the lives of male scientists, they got down to their birthday suits once in a while, but only Marie Curie: The Courage of Knowledge, a joint French-Polish-German production, dares to tell the truth about the woman who developed the concept of radioactivity and pioneered the use of radiation to treat cancer: that if a camera slowly panned along her naked, reclining body (as portrayed by Karolina Gruszka), she might be caught thinking about how unfair it was that the gutter press and her professional enemies would deploy salacious gossip in an attempt to deny her an unprecedented second Nobel Prize.
If — as she notes fairly — Stockholm refused to acknowledge the work of any men who had sex lives, there’d be no Nobel winners at all. So who needs a movie about Curie to actually expand upon how groundbreaking her work was? Director Marie Noelle, who cowrote the script with Andrea Stoll, wisely chose to keep the focus where it belongs: in the boudoir. That’ll show all those stuffy sexists that a woman can be smart and sexy at the same time. That’s what really matters, isn’t it?
I read this right after your review of the Hedy Lamarr biopic. It’s quite a contrast.
Coming soon to an alternative universe near you:
Johanson Pictures presents:
Archimedes and His Sexy Bath
Meanwhile, in another universe, Johanson Pictures is still struggling to find backing for its latest project The Sex Life of Isaac Newton…
With the catchphrase “How do you like *them* apples?”