Dans les pas de Marie Curie

Making a docudrama about Marie Curie and telling the life story of the famous physicist, known for her pioneering research on radioactivity, also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, seemed a good idea a priori. Less so a posteriori, I am afraid. For, if there is no denying Marie Curie WAS ADMIRABLE, having a host of interviewees spend a substantial part of the run time telling us HOW ADMIRABLE this woman was does not make her more admirable, it just makes the film less exciting. Furthermore, too many interviews means too few fiction scenes. Worse, several of the aforementioned scenes lack depth, and accordingly emotion : more than one, for instance, show things as devoid of action and tension as Marie and Pierre riding their bikes, Marie walking, writing, thinking over. Even worse, two of these sequences (the bike one and that of the father and children mourning their wife and mother) are SHOWN TWICE! With such a frail backbone, the film struggles to exist. And if it finally manages to, it owes it to the able voice over commentary and to a good choice of archive documents. The question remains though: couldn't the seventy-nine minutes it lasts have been used more satisfyingly in privileging action over commentary, emotional moments over dull ones, something Alain Brunard's 2014 TVfilm "Marie Curie, une femme sur le front" did quite successfully. The fact remains that Marie Curie's life was so rich that the story of her life cannot but contain interesting moments. And the actress playing Marie, Elisabeth Duda, does a good job of it. Nevertheless, one thing is certain, "Dans les pas de Marie Curie" is not the definitive film about the Grande Dame of science.