Marie Curie in Netflix

The fascinating life of the two-time Nobel winner, Marie Curie, has been made into a film four times, since she was portrayed by Greer Garson in 1943 until today, when Rosamund Pike transforms her into Madame Curie.

A feature film that comes to Netflix today with an unconventional story, which to relive the life of Polish physics and chemistry is based on the book Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a tale of love and fallout, an illustrated biography by Lauren Redniss. A book that also explores the positive and negative consequences of her discoveries, and that revives on the screen under the direction of the Iranian Marjane Satrapi, the cartoonist and filmmaker behind the Persepolis comic and the film that later inspired it. She is in charge of developing an audiovisual story that begins in Paris in 1934, when a sixty-year-old Marie Curie (Pike) vanishes in her laboratories and is sent to the hospital. At the same time that the plot goes several years to the past.

Around 1893, when a twenty-something Maria Skłodowska, or Marie, as she calls herself in France, bumps into the street with a stranger who introduces himself as Pierre Curie (Sam Riley), who, in the near future, offers the solution to a trouble. And although Marie is initially reluctant to the offer, she soon finds herself analyzing uranium and its radiation near Curie. It does not take long for them to share the exploration of this element and the labor society is transformed into love and they decide to marry. But Madame Curie, like the book on which she is based, also juxtaposes the scientists’ past with the consequences of their future findings. With the atomic bomb in Japan and the Chernobyl disaster, and also with the use of radiotherapy against cancer.

In an unusual mix that may surprise the viewer who was expecting a classic biographical film and comes across scenes like when the protagonist is on a Parisian street and a fire truck goes by that goes to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. However, in Madame Curie there are passages from Marie’s life that help to dimension her personality. Like her when she decides to face her peers in a male-dominated scientific environment or she patiently endures the rejection she generates among Parisians.

A repudiation that arises from her relationship with Paul Langevin (Aneurin Barnard), a married colleague who worked alongside her husband and whom she becomes romantically close to after her husband dies in a tragic accident, and for which she receives harsh and racist words. Which makes Madame Curie an interesting, albeit confusing, realization that achieves its best moments in the portrayal of Marie by British actress Rosamund Pike, who was recently seen in an opposite role in Neglect, I care for you. To which is added the fleeting, but always effective presence of her young colleague Anya Taylor-Joy (Lady’s Gambit, The Witch) as Irène Curie, the eldest daughter of the pair of scientists who steals much of the last part of the feature film.