MovieTime

Review

by Julie Rigg

It's curious how glamorous the French resistance appears, as the decades pass. And how widespread. According to the best estimates, a mere two per cent of the French population participated in organised resistance to the German occupation, and to the collaborationist Vichy regime. And that was after D-Day, when numbers swelled from 100,000 to around 400,000.

The images of French resistance I grew up with came from British cinema. There was always one glamorous female agent, often half French, or French by marriage or upbringing. But British, don't y'know.

There were women agents in the Netherlands, in France, In Belgium. At war's end, De Gaulle awarded only six liberation medals to women out of almost a thousand to men.

Now the boys have discovered them. First Paul Verhoeven jumped in with Black Book, a film about an impossibly glamorous Dutch agent who became the mistress of a high ranking Nazi. Oh yes, it was the women who were sent in to whore for their country, in these boys' dreams. Black Book was very, very boys-own stuff.

Director Jean-Paul Salome has said he was inspired to make Female Agents by an obituary he read in The Times about French resistance agent Lise Villameur. Working for British Special Operations, Villameur went on raids and ran a safe house in occupied France. She survived, and died in 2004, aged 98.

But it seems the British did honour the female agents more than the French did.

Salome's film, co-written with Laurent Vachaud, is not a biopic of Villameur. Instead, the authors swing a wide arc, creating five female agents, parachuted in to occupied France to rescue a captured British agent who has vital information about allied D-Day plans. They're an assorted bunch: the leader, Louise Desfontaines (played by Sophie Marceau), is a rather patrician resistance operative whose husband is shot in the opening scene. Julie Depardieu is Jeanne, a hard-bitten thief who killed her pimp and is sprung from prison; Suzy is the former mistress of a Nazi officer who fled the liaison and settled in London. She is depicted as a complete fluff-head. And there is Gaelle, young, patriotic, and extremely religious.

In a few days they're all trained, given their suicide pills and popped on to the night plane. They are going to roll up to the prison where the British agent is held, as a concert party, and distract the establishment while Louise and a local agent spring their boy.

Now I have to tell you that Female Agents is pretty cheesy. Every conceivable wartime resistance movie cliché is delivered here: the spy in love with her German; the hidden-in-a-convent cliché; the whore with the heart of gold, and so forth.

But hey, this is French cheese. Expertly made, with fine texture and strong flavour. There are weird contrasts here between the clichéd plot, and some very well drawn characters between dialogue which had me
groaning at times, and some passages which go further than most films into the emotional drama of the ultimate resistance to interrogation and torture.

So, in the end, I took away a rather schizophrenic impression of this film. It attains real drama when some of the women, and a man, are arrested and interrogated. These scenes are quite haunting, and as unlike the newly fashionable torture porn scenes in American action films, as you can imagine. They actually do raise a moral question. What would you have done? How should we judge those who succumbed?

There are scenes which are nearly ludicrous. And the supply of nylons and lipstick never falters. I am surprised these female agents got as far as they did, because they would surely have stood out in wartime Paris, with not a single faux stocking seam between them.

At least in Foyle's War Sam let us know how the British servicewomen fought their war without lipstick. Beetroot juice, that's how. Not that M Salome and M Verhoeven care.

Qibbles aside, Female Agents is a ripping melodrama. Pity they couldn't come up with a better English language title. The French title, Les femmes d'ombre, is a nod to Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 resistance drama L'arme d'ombre. But then, Melville was there.

Director: Jean-Paul Salomé
Cast: Sophie Marceau, Julie Depardieu, Marie Gillain, Deborah Francois, Moritz Bleibtreu, Maya Sansa, Julien Boisselier, Vincent Rottiers, Volker Bruch
Producer: Éric Névé
Script: Jean-Paul Salomé, Laurent Vachaud
Cinematographer: Pascal Ridao
Music: Bruno Coulais
Running time: 120
Australian distributor: Becker
Language: French
Classification: MA15+