| Director | Marjane Satrapi |
|---|---|
| Budget | $20 million |
| Box office | $3.5 million |
In 1934, Marie Curie collapses in her laboratory in Paris. As she is rushed to the hospital, she remembers her life. In 1893 she was frequently rejected for funding due to her attitude, which she had in common with Pierre Curie. This joint attitude issue with the leading academic authorities led her to share a laboratory with Pierre Curie.
Before Marie discovers polonium and radium, the two fall in love, marry, and have two children. Soon, Marie announces the discovery of radioactivity, revolutionizing physics and chemistry. Radium is soon used in a series of commercial products. Pierre takes Marie to a séance where it is used to attempt to contact the dead, but Marie disapproves of spiritualism and the idea of an afterlife after the death of her mother in Poland.
Although Pierre rejects the Légion d'honneur for not nominating Marie and insists that they jointly share their Nobel Prize in Physics, she becomes agitated that he accepted the Prize in Stockholm without her. Soon afterwards Pierre becomes increasingly sick with anemia as a result of his research and is trampled to death by a horse and cart.
Marie initially dismisses concerns that her elements are toxic, but increasing numbers of people die from serious health conditions after exposure to radium. Depressed, she begins an affair with her colleague Paul Langevin. Although she receives Pierre's professorship at the Sorbonne, the French nationalist press reports the details of her affair with Langevin and she is harassed by xenophobic mobs due to her Polish origins.
Marie returns to the house where she attended the seance and tearfully begs her friend, Loie Fuller, who was there to try to use radium to contact Pierre. When she is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, she defies the committee's instructions not to travel to Stockholm and at her award ceremony receives a standing ovation from the entire audience.
In 1914, when World War I starts, Marie's daughter Irene convinces her to run an X-ray unit on the Western Front in order to determine whether or not amputation is needed for wounded soldiers. Irene begins dating Frédéric Joliot, and Marie initially disapproves of that relationship because of their joint research into induced radioactivity, later asking Irene not to take part in Frédéric's future work on this because of possible effects on her health. Although Irene does not heed her mother, together they go to the Western Front to run the X-ray machine.
Scenes of Marie's life are interwoven with scenes depicting the future impact of her discoveries, including external beam radiotherapy at a hospital in Cleveland in 1956, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a nuclear bomb test in Nevada in 1961, and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. As she dies in 1934, she sees visions of these events before awakening in a hospital room. Pierre arrives and they leave the hospital together.
Before the film's credits, the Curies' accomplishments are detailed, including their mobile unit which X-rayed more than a million men during the war "saving countless lives", their research would be used to create radiotherapy, and the Joliot-Curies would discover artificial or induced radioactivity in 1935.
The movie's last image is of a photo showing Marie Curie's attendance at the 1927 Solvay Conference with many other celebrated physicists, including Albert Einstein.