Waste of time

Absolutely brilliant

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A bit like a female-cast, French-with-subtitles version of The Dirty Dozen, with just a smidgen of a James Bond flick. Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers it ain't, but it's a good WW II story. A story about brave women, and only one feminist line in it ("You would never have done this to men," in a situation in which, the guy would certainly have done the same to men.

"Female Agents" from 2007 is the true story of Lise Villameur (here Louise Desfontaines, played by Sophie Marceau), an agent who worked against the Nazis during World War II. There are several films about female World War II spies: Carve Her Name with Pride is one, also a true story and very moving, and the film Odette, also very good.Desfontaines is recruited by her brother Pierre (Julien Boisselier) to find women to help rescue a British geologist from a German hospital. He had been sent to study the soil on the beaches at Normandy in preparation for D-Day and was captured. For the mission, Louise chooses Jeanne (Julie Depardieu), a prostitute who is in prison for murder; an explosives expert Gaëlle Lemenech (Déborah François); and the ex-fiancé of Colonel Karl Heindrich, Suzy Desprez (Marie Gillain). The mission goes off well, but to their consternation, Pierre has another job for them. He needs them to go to Paris to kill Colonel Heindrich who believes the Allies are planning to land in Normandy.Excellent film, suspenseful, gritty, dark, and atmospheric, with wonderful performances by everyone, but especially Marceau, who plays the tough, quick, and enterprising Louise.I'm not sure why this film received a low rating on IMDb, and I also don't know where the bland title came from. I believe "Les femmes de l'ombre" means "Women of the Shadows." There must be something more exciting than "Female Agents."This isn't your typical movie; some of it is hard to watch, but the courage of these women is quite amazing.

At the time of Female Agent's production, and as a sentiment that has in all fairness hung around through to around about the present, the French were/are probably making the best films of any nation collectively in the world. With this in mind, we do enjoy a good French film; even more so if it's driven by women, because that can be good fun and since a good Second World War film makes for a fair old crack now and again, what's the problem with sitting down for a cut-and-thrust, causality driven World War 2 resistance picture about varying parties darting across occupied Europe? Female Agents ticks all of the above boxes; a pacey, highly enjoyable little yarn which tells a good story in an unabashed fashion whilst shedding light on the tales of those history has, to a fair old few, since forgotten: the woman out of the factory, and on the front-line of war.The film begins with a Bond-inspired pre-credits action sequence; Sophie Marceau, she of once of a Bond role, plays Louise Desfontaines: a woman who's seemingly at the top of her warmongering game in her sniping of an array of German soldiers on a cold, bleak evening illuminated only by that of the light brought about by the crude lamps dotted around this docklands area and the harsh headlamps to that of an array of German vehicles in and around the locale. Working with a few others, and under a high pressure situation as things spiral out of control inducing a gun fight, she manages to resurrect the situation and escape with her life amidst an unholy mess that should have been a mission executed more smoothly. It's 1944, and our Louise is placed at the forefront of a larger, more important mission that she will lead in the field, for which she will require the recruitment of certain others. The crew are a motley, disparate lot; a faction of women of varying ages, backgrounds and views on what constitutes a way of life together for this mission based in northern France. These include the likes of Maria (Sansa), a nurse; Suzy (Gillain), a woman formerly a stage strip tease performer; an explosives expert in Gaëlle (François) and that of Jeanne (Depardieu), who's dragged from prison and is there in the first place on some serious sanctions - she's killed, and she'll be asked to kill again.Once they are rounded up and taken to a British airfield additionally populated by that of the men of the American Air Force, a scene that will no doubt go down like a lead balloon stateside plays out in which a bomber crew make light of the women by wolf whistling as they strut past. Yes, it's in good fun but it is first and foremost director Jean-Paul Salomé highlighting the threat of both objectification and transgression these women face in a film of this nature; here addressing it and, by making us aware of such an item, steadily deviating from what would otherwise be an ill-minded approach to dealing with these women driving a film that will come to be rich in action and the process of placing these women and their bodies on the front-line of warfare. The women have a foil, a Nazi colonel whom is ahead of the game; a man whom manages to make frighteningly accurate predictions on where the imminent Normandy landings will take place. It is in fact a proposal put to an array of German higher-ups in a briefing room; a proposal which is promptly mocked by those within and therefore dismissed. The man is Karl Heindrich (Bleibtreu), and in spite of these disagreements, we sense is unafraid to make swift decisions and as a result of his predictions, must have a fair degree of intuition.Desfontaines and her team's mission goes well, a job in a quaint manor house occupied by the Germans adhering to the Where Eagles Dare ideology of seducing and sneaking your way in but opting to shoot one's way out – blowing the odd thing up in the process not necessarily harming proceedings. Post job, the game changes; and while Salomé's film has been accused of borrowing an awful lot from various war films, The Dirty Dozen in particular, its twist after the opening act has it mostly feel like something in the region of Peckinpah's The Getaway or Frankenheimer's French-set chase thriller Ronin. There are even splashes of Infernal Affairs; the film mutating into a film detailing a Frenchmen in league with the Nazi's discovered by the girls, and consequently forced by the girls, into working with the titular agents as one of their own are simultaneously caught and tortured by the Germans into revealing secrets which could ruin everything.The things about Female Agents we enjoy most lie with its director's ability to get on with proceedings; we enjoy the notion of two distinct factions, each with enough of a force behind them, barging through most of occupied Europe desiring their prize: the general wrongfulness or evilness of the Nazi war-machine under Heindrich chasing that of the empowered women looking to get away, although hang around long enough to save a few of their own, subverting that of, and continuing the sense of this being a crime film-come-'fallout-from-a-heist' movie, Mann's male dominated Heat or De Palma's The Untouchables as a film covering characters trapped in oneupmanship. The film is sharp but tough to watch on the occasions it needs to be; thrilling and exciting, without ever exploiting the warfare as action, when it needs to be and makes for a really decent resistance movie in a recent canon of films that are as such.

This is a very exciting and effective film about female espionage agents of the British S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) during World War II. It is ironical that it is the French, not the British, who made this film, in which only a few sentences of English are spoken. The English subtitles are really too rapid, I must point out. Apart from a few scenes set in England, the film effectively all takes place in Nazi Occupied France under the revolting Vichy Regime in 1944, where all the dangerous missions in the story take place. As the film proceeds, we realize that the underlying threat is that the secrets of the D-Day Normandy landings are in danger of being betrayed, thus destroying their surprise value and enabling the Nazis to win the War. So the stakes could not be higher. According to titles shown at the end of the film, this story is in many respects true, and the lead character played with tremendous, bitter panache by Sophie Marceau only died as recently as 2004 at the age of 98! As she was a French woman, though working as an agent for the SOE (and her brother worked for De Gaulle's Free French in London), that must explain why her story was known in France, and why it was French producers who decided to film it. The story as filmed contains countless inaccuracies of procedure and plot which could never really have happened, and some details are ridiculous (a sister and brother sent on the same mission together!?). So the story has been greatly hyped-up to 'Hollywoodize' it, by the French Hollywood, which we might perhaps call by the name of Tuileriewood-en-Seine, or Tile-Town as opposed to Tinsel-Town ('a night out on the tiles' being a good description for some Paris evenings). The film starts rather slowly, and one is not certain that it is going to work at first. But when it gets into its stride, it is gripping and coherent. There are many grisly scenes of torture by the Gestapo, which take a strong stomach, and seeing Nazis savagely and maniacally beating up women and nearly drowning them in water tanks, even pulling out their finger nails (this is done to the delicately beautiful actress Deborah Francois, who appears as fragile as the petals of a fluttering chamomile flower on a windy day), is more than merely upsetting. However, it was obviously decided by the producers that these pretty young women were to be treated with as much grit as men, both in their actions and in the depiction of their fates. It is no bad thing to remind viewers of how the Nazis behaved, and that they really did these things. There are some detailed touches which add to the horror of it all: a Gestapo woman clerk sits impassively at a small wooden table making notes, wholly unmoved by the agonized shrieks and screams of the women being tortured in front of her. As for the Nazi SS colonel supervising all of this and trying to get the information out of them, he could not be more bored and oblivious to the suffering and the screams, which to him are merely tedious. To the Nazis, torturing human beings was no different from stepping on ants. If it accomplishes nothing else, perhaps this film will make a few young people think for a moment about a War which to them is now 'long ago and far away', and why should they be interested. Just seeing a screen title informing us that the Gestapo's Paris Headquarters was in Avenue Foch is enough to precipitate a mild attack of hysteria. That is where all the billionaires now live in luxury. I have been in a couple of their grand houses, and all I can say is: 'Nom de Dieu!' And to think that it was in those surroundings, where the super-rich now besport themselves with their vintage Cristal champagne (I must admit it is delicious, but no one really needs it), that the Gestapo pulled out the finger nails of beautiful girls in their early twenties and thought nothing of it, merely finding their screams of pain a bore! Do see this film, if only to be horrified and appalled, but also to admire the courage of the women, not only the men, who gave their lives to defeat the greatest evil that befell a much-accursed earth during the 20th century, the regime of the monstrous instruments of Evil who dared to call themselves a Master Race.