The problem with making an accurate film about science is that science is rarely exciting to watch, explains director Marjane Satrapi. Movie convention tends to insist on the climax of the eureka moment and the fiction of the solitary male genius, who doggedly closes in on his discovery in the same way that a detective might doggedly close in on a killer. ‘It doesn’t happen this way,’ says Satrapi. ‘It’s a result of lots and lots of work, which most of the time is repetitive and most of the time you know you don’t know where you’re going, and it’s lots of collaboration.’
Satrapi studied mathematics in her birthplace of Iran, and has a scientist’s intolerance for dramatic licence. ‘You cannot make a film about science and then lie about science. It will be a fraud.’ Which explains how she came to be attached to Radioactive, a wholly unconventional biopic of Marie Curie — who, it turns out, was a wholly unconventional woman in many ways. The familiar version of the Curie story is a template for acceptable female genius: yes, she discovered radiation and two new elements, but she did so with her husband Pierre and while bringing up two children, and what’s more she contracted leukaemia from her work. It’s a narrative of brilliance framed by feminine self-sacrifice.
The Curie of Satrapi’s film (played, with disarming veracity, by a stern-faced Rosamund Pike) is not self-sacrificing. She fights with the science faculty of the Sorbonne, where she is one of only 23 female students out of 4,000, and ends up losing her lab space. She fights with Pierre Curie when he offers her room in his laboratory, insisting that her work will be her own. She bridles at motherhood: one of the film’s best lines has her asking her young daughters if they ‘need feeding’, then sending them on their way.
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