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Sunday, May 30, 2010

BD impressions: Female Agents

2:03 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

Within about five minutes of starting to watch FEMALE AGENTS, I found myself experiencing pronounced feelings of déjà vu. I recently read a novel by Ken Follett called JACKDAWS - an espionage thriller about an all-woman team of agents who parachute into France shortly before D-Day in order to carry out a vital mission which could decide the success or the failure of the Allied operation. JACKDAWS was published in 2001; FEMALE AGENTS was released in 2008. Neither claims any connection to the other. And yet, as I continued to watch I found myself mentally checking off the instances of events and details that were virtually identical to those of Follett's novel. Both begin with a botched attack in which the heroine's resistance fighter husband is shot (killed in one, seriously injured in the other), both involve the recruiting of a flighty bunch of ladies completely unqualified for the task at hand and deceived as to the true nature of their mission... one of these ladies is even a murderer on death row, for chrissakes!

What is the explanation for these similarities? The generous one would be to suggest that both stories were inspired by the same events and/or people. The protagonist of FEMALE AGENTS, Louise Desfontaines (Sophie Marceau), is loosely based on a real SOE agent, Lisé de Baissac... although, judging by her Wikipedia entry, she was not involved in any mission bearing any resemblance to the one depicted in the film. JACKDAWS makes no direct claim to be based on real individuals or events, but the postscript does imply that its heroine, Felicity Clairet, may on some level have been inspired by Pearl Witherington, a British courier who took command of a 2,000-strong guerilla group in Berry. So, seemingly no common heritage, then. I'm wary of accusing FEMALE AGENTS' writer/director, Jean-Paul Salomé of outright plagiarism, but the evidence is highly suspect.

JACKDAWS is not great literature. The prose is often plain to the point of monosyllabic and the characters are too exaggerated and underdeveloped to be taken seriously. It's entertaining, though - a sort of female DIRTY (half-)DOZEN able to turn on a dime from being a bombastic Boy's (Girl's, rather) Own romp to something darker and considerably nastier. It's ultimately an undemanding and engaging page-turner - a sort of DA VINCI CODE with longer chapters, a more engaging protagonist and a (marginally) less ridiculous plot. In other words, an airport novel - appropriately enough, I read most of it during my various journeys back and forth to Bristol. FEMALE AGENTS is considerably more serious in its intentions, with a sombre tone and sense of dignified gravity. That's not to say that it isn't tense and exciting in all the right places, and it certainly manages to avoid the almost pious depiction of SOE agents that characterised most of the films of this sort made when the war was a more recent memory. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that a more gung-ho, fanciful romp is just itching to get out - and on a few brief occasions it does, such as the improbably elaborate stunt the women pull off as they rescue a captured British agent from a Nazi-controlled hospital.

It's perhaps because it isn't being entirely honest in its intentions that FEMALE AGENTS isn't quite as satisfying as it could have been. In terms of recent big screen depictions of World War 2-era espionage, I still think Paul Verhoeven's BLACK BOOK, ridiculous though it is, is the most engaging. Others, like Ole Christian Madsen's FLAME & CITRON and Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's MAX MANUS are more serious but somehow less gripping. FEMALE AGENTS is far closer in tone (if not in spirit) to the latter two than to Verhoeven's lavish pot-boiler, but at the same time, BLACK BOOK, with its moral ambiguity and characters whose motivations are more nuanced than mere po-faced patriotism, is actually the more complex film and, for all its B-movie qualities, the more intellectually satisfying.

Image quality: I have to say, after watching a string of digitally-photographed productions recently (AVATAR, DISTRICT 9, season five of WEEDS...), it was nice to finally sit down and watch something shot on film, with all its depth and texture. The BD of FEMALE AGENTS isn't perfect, but it does look pretty nice on the whole, with pleasing if not outstanding detail. The film has a low contrast look with a strong yellow/green push, which makes it look a little on the sickly side, but I can only assume that this was a deliberate aesthetic choice. Compression, unfortunately, is a little dicey in places - presumably the effect of using a single-layer disc. Grain also seems a little on the mushy side - deliberately reduced, or a side-effect of the compression? 7/10

It's also worth pointing out that, unlike certain other titles from Revolver, this one plays at 23.976 fps, not 25, and doesn't have burned-in subtitles.

Female Agents
studio: Revolver; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 18.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 22.25 Mbit/sec

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