FAST & FURIOUS isn’t the only game in town fixated on family. Cate Shortland’s Black Widow gives Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), the great loner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a family of her own, in the shape of the dysfunctional Russian spies and assassins with whom she grew up as a sleeperer agent in the States, and with whom she is reunited in the course of the prequel’s story. For Shortland, the question of family drove the film. “For me, as an adoptive mother, and for one of my producers, Victoria Alonso, who’s also an adoptive mother, the film was about, ‘What is family?’” says Shortland. “Is it biological or is it relationships and history and the time that we spent together?” The film answers that question, fairly emphatically: family is something that can be found, and moulded, and rekindled.ed. Here, Shortland talks us through Natasha’s new family unit.
NATASHA