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Film Of The Week Stranger than fiction

MARIA DUARTE sees Judi Dench delivers an outstanding performance as a Soviet spy in an improbable story based on fact

Red Joan
Directed by Trevor Nunn

THIS old-fashioned spy thriller is inspired by the life of former agent Melita Norwood, who spent years spying for the Soviet Union in Britain undetected.

Based on Jennie Rooney’s novel Red Joan, it opens in the year 2000 with frail-looking octogenarian Joan Stanley (a magnificent Judi Dench) being arrested at her suburban home by MI5 and charged with 27 breaches of the Official Secrets Act.

On being hauled into an interrogation room, she starts to recall in a series of flashbacks how she went from Cambridge undergraduate in 1938 to scientist to Russian spy.

With great passion and conviction Sophie Cookson plays the young and idealistic Stanley, a physics student who falls for young communist activist Leo Galich (Tom Hughes) who tries to groom her for social and political action.

What the film highlights is how women were so under-rated and undervalued at the time that Stanley, a learned physicist who joined a top secret project aimed at creating the atomic bomb, was able to pass crucial intelligence to the Soviets without raising any suspicions — who would suspect a harmless elderly pensioner of being the KGB’s longest serving British spy?

We share the incredulity of her lawyer and son Nick (Ben Miles), who’s shocked and horrified at the allegations against his mother. How can you live and grow up with someone all your life and know nothing about them, that’s the question.

But the film suggests that Stanley divulged the plans for an atomic weapon to the Soviet Union —  Britain’s allies at the time — to prevent another Hiroshima or Nagasaki and keep the world safe rather than because of communist ideology.

Director Trevor Nunn delivers a solid and slow-burning spy thriller — more Enigma than 007 — which comes across as a made-for-TV film but which is lifted by Dench’s masterclass of a performance. If only she had featured more.

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