Female Agents (Les Femmes de l'Ombre)
French director Jean-Paul Salomé, was interested in telling a story from the perspective of the women who worked for the resistance during the Second World War.
As we discover in Female Agents, not all recruits were entirely voluntary, and there was often some degree of exploitation of the women in order to satisfy the underground’s political agenda.
The situation was often evident to the women, some of whom willingly put their lives in danger, others not. One character in this film laments the futility of the operation for which they’ve been recruited. After the war, she insists women will all go back to being sluts and servants. In this film, we see the courageous and the coerced.
Female agents is set during the time in which Allied forces were preparing to land in Normandy. Though many of the details are largely fictitious, the main character, Louise (played by Sophie Marceau), is based on a real woman: Lise Villameur nee de Baissac, who did some extraordinary things during the war, and who managed to survive and lead a relatively normal life afterwards. Most of the women who worked for the resistance had a difficult time at the end of the war – often being treated with some degree of suspicion. While it was acceptable for men to go and fight, it was considered unseemly for women to engage in subterfuge and violence.
The female agents in this story, are a motley group seconded to a special mission: to retrieve a British soldier who is in a hospital tended by Germans. It’s only a matter of time before he talks, and the Normandy landing could be thwarted.
The diverse group enables Salomé to provide some insight into the variety of backgrounds from which the women in the resitstance came, as well as their attitudes towards their mission. Though most women were well educated, some were recruited to utilise their particular skills and others, such as one of our heroines, Suze, as bait.
Suze has fled to England after breaking off a relationship with a Nazi colonel. Moritz Bleibtreu plays the colonel in a masterstroke of casting, in which the director went to pains not to portray a stereotypical Aryan: after all, many of the Nazi party officials were far from blond-haired and blue-eyed.
Bleibtreu’s Colonel Heindrich is a classy, cultured and charismatic man. Why wouldn’t Suze want him? But he also has a job to do, and these are brutal times.
The members of the resistance are equally intent on their purpose, in this gripping drama that refuses to present the morally intricate situation in a simplistic, good versus evil fashion.
Just as the predicaments and emotions are real, so too is the cinematography, which defies the grey/beige cliché, and opts instead, for a more realistic palette, that brings this time and its people vividly to life.
This intelligent film has it all: drama, action, romance, tragedy and suspense, delivered by a strong cast truthfully portraying interesting and multi-faceted characters.