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Female Agents
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| Year: |
2008
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Director: |
Jean-Paul Salomé
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| Stars: |
Sophie Marceau, Julie Depardieu, Marie Gillain, Déborah François, Moritz Bleibtreu, Maya Sansa, Julien Boisselier, Vincent Rottiers, Volker Bruch, Robin Renucci, Xavier Beauvois, Colin David Reese, Jurgen Mash, Conrad Cecil, Alexandre Jazede
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| Genre: |
War |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 2 votes) |
| Review: |
It is early 1944 and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E. for short, are doing excellent work on Continental Europe, behind enemy lines, to ensure that the war is not going all the Nazis' way. Many of the agents are women, and one French lady who has been ordered to command her own mission is Louise Desfontaines (Sophie Marceau): she must unite four other women to rescue a geologist who was captured scouting out the Normandy beaches in preparation for D-Day, which happens in two months' time. Can they succeed?
Well, obviously they do, or we might still be under the Nazi regime in Europe to this day, but given that hard facts were somewhat neglected in favour of high adventure with a wartime flavour, you might not have been too surprised to see history reinvented by the climax of this. It was director and co-writer Jean-Paul Salomé's follow up to his Arsène Lupin adaptation which had mixed reviews at best; it appeared he was on safer ground here, as Female Agents (the curiously bland English title for Les Femmes de l'ombre) won a far warmer welcome.
This is probably because Salomé took a breathless style of derring-do to its story, which as the end credits say does pay tribute to the women of the S.O.E. by in effect turning them into glamorous movie stars. And make no mistake, our heroines are dolled up to the nines in the best forties fashion, looking great even when they are at their worst. Those scenes where they are at their lowest ebb involve a lot of violence, suggesting a rather unhealthy, fetishistic approach to the lead characters, or the way the images of them are presented at any rate.
But really we're in Dirty Dozen territory here, with the reluctant recruits, one a murderess and another a collaborator, pressed into service and drawing on a well of courage to propel them into legendary status, essentially redeeming them for whatever misdemeanours they may have been caught up in during the past. They have a contact in the French hospital the geologist is being held in, and yes he is being tortured too, so after a parachute jump into the country Louise and company, including her brother Pierre (Julien Boisselier), manage to free him with some bloodshed but no casualties on their side.
However, Louise has a nemesis in the shape of Colonel Heindrich of the SS (Moritz Bleibtreu) who tracks her down - or is she his nemesis? There's quite a battle of wills between these two throughout the film, each gaining the upper hand only to lose it once more, plotting that offers the requisite degree of tension. To complicate matters, the collaborator Suzy (Marie Gillain) is the Colonel's great love, and Pierre is captured, and tortured (lots of torture in this, as you'll have noticed). He won't break, but what about the beautiful but weak explosives expert Gaëlle (Déborah François), who blabs all she knows after getting a fingernail ripped off? Salomé keeps a sure hand on his convoluted narrative, and with so much at stake the film is genuinely absorbing, even if it leads up to a finale that is anticlimactic despite the defeat of the Nazis. Music by Bruno Coulais.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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