Film Review: Black Widow by Cate Shortland

In Black Widow, director Cate Shortland procures an antivenom for the mistreatment and sexualisation of Natasha Romanoff within the Marvel franchise.

Image by marvelousRoland on Flickr

The prologue of Black Widow is a cleverly orchestrated flashback to 1995 Ohio, where a blue-dipped haired young Natasha Romanoff is older sister to Yelena and daughter to Melina and Alexei in a suburban American pseudo-family. Mum, Melina, (an understated yet convincing Rachel Weisz) and Dad, Alexei, (an irresistibly loveable David Harbour) match the emotional potential of Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), and the foursome, while fabricating a nuclear family, inadvertently experience the conflicting feelings of guilt and unconditional affection that are entrenched in framework of those many real, estranged families. 

Alexei, a bumbling and useless superhero, whose ‘super’ is merely a projection of his male vanity, and Yelena provide frequent comic interludes from the more intimate moments in what is a tonally complex film. In particular, Pugh mines the emotional depth and vulnerability latent beneath Yelena’s steeled, sarcastic exterior, imbuing her dialogue with sardonic humour and delivering it with narrative finesse. Pugh, who received an Oscar nomination for her perceptive performance as Amy March, explores a new iteration of fractured sisterhood. The locus of the film is the thrumming chemistry between her and Natasha, formed through their contrasting sentimentalism and realism.

In Black Widow, female director, Cate Shortland, whose Berlin Syndrome similarly explores the broken psyche of isolated young women, and female writer, Jac Schaeffer (WandaVision), construct an espionage thriller that is simultaneously requiem and swan song for Natasha Romanoff. Black Widow riffs on the Bond aesthetic: Natasha is not a superhero with a mechanised super-suit, but a woman with killer instincts and an arachnoid pose, one of the few female Avengers. In a masculine genre where schoolboys get bitten by spiders and turn into superheroes, Black Widow does not rely on external forces to foster her strength: a female superheroine who does not need superpowers to bite back. If anything, perhaps Black Widow is a sign of the times: that they are changing, and that the future may, after all, be female – welcome to the spider-verse sexual revolution. 

The film decidedly locates its inspiration in reality; Natasha is fighting the coercion and forced sterilisation of young women, not some otherworldly power. The ‘widow’ operatives are chemically manipulated and bred as mindless assassins without agency or free will – a fable of what could happen if the patriarchy remained unchecked. Whereas, an older Natasha and Yelena are what would happen if girls had the arsenal to enact revenge against the men who have oppressed them; they are, in many ways, symbolic of the everywoman whose threat has been systematically subdued (through mind control or, more likely, gaslighting) by men. During an opening montage, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” plays over clips of stylised girlhood – gymnasts training, girls dancing around a maypole, cartoons of girls in dresses – spliced with caged pigs. Like animals, girls are a “natural resource that the world has too much of”. Against the USA Gymnastics story over the last decade, the image of gymnasts is particularly unsettling – as with the widows, they are still fighting to dismantle the systems of abuse that trained and shaped them. Although Black Widow’s solo vehicle was long overdue, perhaps the interlude was necessary for a mainstream Marvel movie to ponder and, finally, address the control of women’s bodies.

As a women-led film with a female writer and director, Black Widow inevitably invites scrutiny under a feminist lens, and certainly the script has a female fingerprint. At one point, Yelena is over-enthused about her new vest, “look how cool it is! It has so many pockets!” – a barbed joke written for female viewers, who are likely conscious of the scarcity of pockets in women’s clothing, as well as the gendered history of pockets and their correlation with power. Perhaps these fingerprints are forming a new blueprint for Marvel films: women are shaping the cinematic universe from both behind and in front of the camera. Before Scarlett Johansson’s solo debut, Brie Larson featured as the studio’s first female superhero lead; however, it seems that some comic book nerds are not ready for mainstream asskickery by women, photoshopping smiles onto Larson’s promotional photos, physicalising the need for women to be likeable and, once again, highlighting the perceived role of women in action-centric films as eye candy, sidekicks, or stereotypes.

My first introduction to Natasha Romanoff was in 2012’s The Avengers, bound to a chair in black tights and a little black dress, resembling a male fantasy, with her venomous glance framed in such a way that it is conflated with her sexuality. In Black Widow’s first outing in Iron Man 2, from (glaringly male) director Jon Favreau, she, like many other female assassins, must seduce to survive. She weaponises her beauty in predictable Hollywood bait-and-switches: objectification under the guise of female empowerment. (Tony Stark demands “I want one!”, while Pepper Potts warns of “a very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit if you keep ogling her like that”, a comment that acquires a darker undercurrent within the context of the #MeToo cultural climate.) 11 years on, and indeed following the #MeToo paradigm shift, Black Widow is a sexless narrative, in which Natasha is not hampered by, nor is herself reduced to, a love interest. Johansson recently spoke about Black Widow’s hypersexualisation in previous films, and how these gender politics are shifting. She is not an appendage to man, but an action hero in her own right. Here, like the spider with which she shares her name, Black Widow ensnares her male counterparts, not through titillation, as is traditional with a femme fatale, but instead through intelligence and physical prowess.

If Men Written By Women, the likes of which include Laurie Lawrence (recently embodied by resident soft-boi Timothée Chalamet) and Connell Waldron (chain-adorned Paul Mescal), have become a trademark, surely Women Written By Women, typified by their emotional complexity and sensibility, merit their own category. These women are morally ambiguous, fleshing out two-dimensional psychological portraits of femininity, risking our sympathies but ultimately harnessing them with a raw document of not just womanhood, what it means to be woman, but also to be human. While these women are on screen, under the watchful eye of a female director, the camera hugs rather than caresses, accessing the nuances that only close-up rather than full-body shots can, and that male directors often only flirt with. In Black Widow, the fight sequences highlight rather than obscure the intense physicality of our warriors, lending them a dynamism that is not performative. Instead, the choreographed knifework and airborne stunts showcase their muscularity, locked in a lethal mirror-dance that, in one instance, culminates in a mutual stranglehold, evoking the pas de deux of “Killing Eve”. In what little profile of Natasha’s bare body there is, it is not gratuitous, but rather to show her battle scars – reconstructing female bodies as kinetic instead of visual.

Black Widow paradoxically unfolds in the past, in the space that exists between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, where Natasha navigates both the splintered Avengers and her own ruptured history. These temporal disjunctions disorient and distort, and the film itself is confusingly bittersweet – where in action films, much of the thrill is embedded within the mortality of our protagonist, within the Marvel stratosphere, Natasha’s fate is certain and immutable. Perhaps the film’s tangled web is too intricately spun, concentrated on connecting it to Marvel’s overarching narrative, while deeper thematics, such as the subjugation of women, does sometimes feel underdeveloped. Although the subtext of grooming and sex trafficking is not-so-subtle, it feels that many of those secondary female characters who need to speak out are suppressed, reduced to whispers under the loud explosions required by the Marvel formula. Nevertheless, Black Widow, in a homogenising franchise that itself has often whittled her down into submission, rises above the noise and is finally heard.