The film opens in black & white, in a Sorbonne classroom
set for science lectures, tiered tables and uncomfortable
wooden chairs, a room full of seated and suited young men,
eager to learn. Among the studious gents slouches a singular
young lady, dressed smartly, appropriate dark heavy frock, lace
at the collar, her face framed in a shock of blonde, finger waves
a bit disheveled. She is obviously distracted, weary, not quite
yet glassy-eyed. In the front of the class, in his makeshift opera
pit, a bespectacled older gentleman, balding & bearded in his worst
Hollywood French accent, rambles on of the brilliance that bursts
from loneliness, the loneliness of scientists, of Galileo and Pascal,
how if you believe in yourself, you can catch a star in your fingertips.
The young lady suddenly slumps to the table, body goes limp, arms
collapse over the edges. The scene fades out, fades in. In greyscale,
we move to the professor’s office and then to a café for lunch, as she
cannot remember when she last ate and she has no friends in Paris.
She only loves physics, mathematics, and Poland. This is not Poland.
This is our introduction to Mademoiselle Maria Salomea Sklodowska.
This is before she meets Dr. Pierre Curie, a poet with brains, a poet
with a laboratory. This will be a love story, an appropriate love story.
