Country: France
Genre: Action
Director: Jean-Paul Salomé
Year: 2008
Rating:

TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE

The title Female Agents conjures up the image of a junky, campy romp, featuring scantily clad women seducing Nazis and enduring nipple torture from the SS. Instead, Female Agents is more of a French Dirty Dozen, featuring women.

But that doesn’t really capture the flavor of the picture. For one thing, the events depicted in the movie really did happen.

Shortly before D-Day, an English geologist was captured by the Germans while he was taking soil samples around Normandy. Several women were drafted for an incredibly daring mission: break the geologist out of a hospital crammed to the gills with Nazi soldiers, under the nose of SS Colonel Heindrich (Moritz Bleibtreu). Only one of the women, Louise Desfontaines (Sophie Marceau), wanted to be part of the squad. She was a French resistance fighter who lost her husband to the Nazis. The others had to be coerced. There’s Jeanne (Julie Depardieu), a prostitute who was sentenced to be hanged for killing her pimp. Gaëlle (Déborah François) designs bombs but hasn’t ever fired a gun. Suzy (Marie Gillain) was in love with Colonel Heindrich, but broke off the engagement. If she doesn’t cooperate with the mission, she will be shot for being a collaborater.

Of course, since these women are French, they are often very rude. Much of the dialogue is a treat. There is also a great deal of action. Since we’re dealing with a true story, much of what happens is unpredictable, which increases the suspense quite a bit.

But Female Agents isn’t perfect. For one thing, it moves too fast for it’s own good. Granted, it’s a relief not to deal with the dumbed down dramaturgy of American movies, but so much happens so quickly, and complicated relationships are set up with such economy, that I was grateful I could hit the pause button to think about what I just seen, and in some cases, even hit the rewind button. Really, a reasonably intelligent viewer should be able to glean the essential aspects of the plot with just one viewing.

Sometimes, writer/director Jean-Paul Salomé will reveal a relationship after a key event. For example, we find out that a character was Louise Desfontaines’ husband several minutes after he was shot. The impact of that sequence would have been greater had we known who he was. And there are several examples of that kind of faulty structure in the script.

Secondly, director Jean-Paul Salomé is seemingly indecisive about what kind of movie he wants to make. On the one hand, he elects to stay reasonably close to the facts of the story, but if he wanted to hype the reality of the piece, why is so much of the filming stylized? For example, several bar scenes are shot in exaggerated sepia lighting. Many of the night scenes are shot in deep shadow. In my opinion, if Salomé had wanted to play up the true life aspect of the movie, he would have been better off with a kind of heightened naturalism.

On the other hand, if Salomé had been going for sheer entertainment value, he could have consistently employed the blatantly artificial architextural suspense of a sequence that takes place in the Paris metro, in which an attempted assassination of a high-ranking Nazi official takes place.

But Salomé never does choose, and the result is a stylistic inconsistency that catches the viewer off guard and pulls you out of the picture.

Finally, because Salomé sticks close to the facts, he’s stuck with an ending which is rather anticlimactic.

Nethertheless, Female Agents is interesting (I never knew that a commando squad of women played such a large part in the successful invasion of Normany), well-acted, exciting, and suspenseful, in large part because the sense of jeopardy is constant and excruciating — because this is a true story, you can’t be sure who will still be standing by the end credits.

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