The Secret Service) as the fictional Joan, a naïve physics student at Cambridge, whose Natasha Fatale-like best friend Sonya (Tereza ... Ah, the things we do for love. The plot is something of a slow-paced suspense story, in which Joan is drawn into Sonya and Leo’s politics-driven world, and begins a love affair with the charming but elusive Leo. However, it's understandable that a film can only tell about a quarter of the story. I missed some of the early parts of the story from the novel which help to understand Joan's background, her relationship with Leo & Sonya, as well as her motivation to leak classified documents. While it appears that she did what she was accused of doing my take-away is that Melita was a naive young woman who did the wrong thing for (in her estimation) the right reasons. Instead, Red Joan splits the difference, choosing to de-politicize Joan’s reasons for giving the Soviets secret information and ascribing the dirty politics of it all to Sonya and Leo, while failing to truly explore Joan’s realization that science is not, and has never been, devoid of politics. Admittedly, the expected attributes of a slick espionage thriller (like globe-trotting mystique and heart-pumping moments of suspense) aren’t great in number here. “Red Joan” is a traditional production, polished as brass and as old-school diverting as a film starring Judi Dench and directed by Trevor Nunn would have to be. Red Joan is the fictionalized story of Melita Stedman Norwood who at the age of 87 was accused of being a Soviet spy during the Cold War. As Joan remembers the decades-old events that led to her arrest, the film goes back in time to the 1940s, when the idealistic young Joan (Sophie Cookson) met glamorous socialists Sonya (Tereza Srbova) and Leo at her university, sending her life in an unexpected direction. The pull of “Red Joan”—an adaptation of Jennie Rooney’s bestselling novel by screenwriter Lindsay Shapero—oddly isn’t in the search and reveal of an answer to this question. ... As the older Joan explains, her political attitudes had developed when Sonya and Leo suffered discrimination because of their views and a tragedy occurred, but it was not until Hiroshima that she decided to transmit atomic secrets to the Soviets. May 4, 2019 One Guys Opinion. RED JOAN.