How did Natasha Romanoff become the Black Widow, a superheroine capable of fighting with the Avengers? This is the question that answers Black widow by Cate Shortland. We find Scarlett Johansson in the role of this defector from Eastern countries who must reconnect with a painful past to accept what she has become.
“What is exciting here is that we are defeating the expectations of the public,” explains the director to 20 minutes. We explore dimensions of Natasha that people have absolutely no idea about. We are interested in all the facets of her that we have never seen. It is above all a story of women that this very dark film reveals. That of Natasha certainly, but also those of her sister, played by
Florence pugh, and his mother, played by Rachel Weisz. The men they meet, who take the features of
Ray winstone and
David Harbor, are stolen the spotlight by their female partners, both sorority and motherhood gain importance within the plot.
A family affair and maturity
The young woman will reunite with her old family and face new responsibilities, which push her adventures more towards the spy thriller than the blazing action delusions of previous Marvel opuses. “I did research on Soviet spies and how they are trained with historians,” says Cate Shortland. It allowed me to go more in depth to build the character by making it more realistic. The spectator becomes attached only more to the heroine, which takes on a new fascinating dimension, by plunging into the intimacy of the family unit, while unexpected enemies of her young years come to mess with her.
Less girly than Wonder woman (her loves and her outfits are never at the center of the story), Black widow imposes herself as a wounded woman, both psychologically and physically, which makes her fate particularly poignant. With this opus, the Marvel franchise seems poised to reach adulthood in the cinema. Continuing down this path could only appeal to the spectators who grew up with it.