Female Agents: 120 minutes. Rated: M. Director: Jean-Paul Salome. Starring: Sophie Marceau, Julie Depardieu, Marie Gillain, Maya Sansa, Deborah Francois, Moritz Bleibtreu
A significant problem for Australian audiences of French war drama, Les Femmes de L'ombre is the loose translation of its title. Female Agents smacks of frivolity (is this a gender-switched spin on James Bond perhaps?) and belies the earnestness of the film's intent and the dark corners in which its characters dwell.
A more literal translation — The Women of the Shadow — would be better. This has connotations of spy-thriller espionage and intrigue, and may even be slightly cheesy. But it also captures something of the complexity of character and theme.
This is a film about undercover female soldiers sent into enemy territory during World War II to protect one of the Allied Forces' best-kept secrets. 'The shadow' refers not just to the covert nature of the operation, but also the ethical and emotional implications of putting life and personal integrity on the line in the name of doing your military duty.
The Allies have learned that Colonel Heindrich (Bleibtreu), head of the German counter-intelligence, has had an inkling of the planned D-Day landings at Normandy. So an all-female commando unit is assembled, with trained sniper Louise (Marceau) leading the charge to protect the secret and eliminate Heindrich.
While primarily an action film — and a fairly average one at that — Female Agents finds strength in the way it pays particular attention to the power of femininity when working undercover against a male-dominated military. It examines how the women, when invoking this particular power, need to subject themselves to being exploited in order that they might exploit their opponent.
For example, when the commando unit sets out to retrieve an injured British soldier from a German hospital, snatching him from the enemy before he can be tortured into divulging sensitive information, two of the 'agents' create a diversion by performing a striptease for a room full of hollering soldiers. It is unlikely a male soldier would ever be called upon to perform such a task, and less likely he'd be able to carry it off as successfully.
In this regard Female Agents bears comparison with the terrific 2006 Dutch film Black Book. That film's heroine, a Jewish resistance fighter working undercover against the Nazi occupation in the Netherlands, is used and abused awfully by the men in the film, yet by