Both have thrown themselves into the war to compensate for their parents' passive collaboration as followers of Pétain. Sober historical credentials established, the picture returns to colour, and Louise in London, having located her brother Pierre (Julien Boisselier), now a lieutenant with Colonel Maurice Buckmaster's Special Operations Executive (SOE). This is followed by the opening credits, a black-and-white montage of war photographs depicting women combatants. The film contains a succession of exciting, well-staged action sequences, starting with a night-time shoot-out in early 1944 in the marshalling yards in Brest, with considerable loss of life, some due to ace sniper Louise Desfontaine (the fetching Sophie Marceau), who sees her husband, head of the group, killed before her eyes. There are echoes here of British pictures about doughty Resistance heroines (Odette, Carve Her Name With Pride, Charlotte Gray), Robert Aldrich's pre-D-Day action yarn The Dirty Dozen and Melville's 1969 classic, which it evokes in its original French title, Les Femmes de l'ombre Others, like Jacques Audiard who made the satirical Un Héros très discret (1995), were born later, and clearly the people behind the highly enjoyable Female Agents, for all their research, are chiefly influenced by the tradition of war movies. They had personal knowledge of the guilt and troubled memories. These films were made by people who lived through the war. There is now a considerable body of movies on the Occupation, ranging from masterworks like Louis Malle's tragic Lacombe Lucien (1974) to François Truffaut's evasively romantic The Last Metro (1980). But the nettle wasn't truly grasped until Marcel Ophüls' searching 250-minute documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity (1971), which stirred up a hornets' nest and was banned from French TV. Between those two, Brigitte Bardot made an expedition from London to occupied France to abduct a German general in Babette Goes to War (1959). Jean-Pierre Melville, who'd served with de Gaulle's army in exile, made two notable films - Le Silence de la mer (1949) and L'Armée des ombres (1969), a downbeat, fictionalised epic about the Resistance movement. The complex French experience of the Occupation, the myths, realities and misrepresentations of collaboration and resistance, was a touchy subject.
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