jdonalds-5 I don't often dole out 10 stars for movies. I reserve that for nothing but the best, and this is one of them.I have a little bit of bias first because I am a student of WWII, and second because I lived in Paris France for three years. This was a powerful story well told. I found it completely plausible, having good dialog, great acting, wonderful cinematography, and with a story line that held up solidly throughout the entire movie.There are some rough parts, that is some parts are difficult to observe, but those were in context without being egregious. My French isn't good enough for me to follow without reading the subtitles. I'm sorry because I was not able to give 100% of my attention to the wonderful visuals.I did look this story up enough to learn that it was based on a true story. I don't know how much of this was totally true but it didn't matter because it was so well told.Congratulations to the director Jean-Paul Salomé.I may actually purchase the DVD.

nicholls_les Sophie Marceau leads an excellent cast in this gripping movie.Based on true events it begins in 1944, a group of French servicewomen and resistance fighters are enlisted into the British Special Operations Executive commando group under the command of Louise Desfontaines and her brother Pierre.Their mission, to rescue a British army geologist caught reconnoitering the beaches at Normandy, and to kill a German SS colonel who is close to figuring out the imminent secret of D-Day, proves to be emotional and brutal.The film moves at a good pace and is so well acted you feel for the characters.

jotix100 WWII and the Nazis are favorite subjects to turn into films. "Female Agents" takes a different approach to tell a story about the last days of the conflict. When a British agent is wounded and caught by the Germans while on a mission prior to the landing at Normandy, his superiors in England go into action enlisting exiled brother and sister, Pierre and Louise Desfontaines to fly into France to rescue the wounded man from his captors.There is little preparation before the actual D-Day invasion. It is May, only a few days until the planned Allied landing. Pierre enlists his own widowed sister Louise, an expert in tactical planning to put together a small group to assist her in the rescue operation. Thus, a motley crew is assembled, Louise plus four other women will go to do their contribution to the war effort. The women come from different ways of life. Each one has a particular area of expertise to help the cause.Alas, not everything goes according to plan. The women are facing one of the most feared Nazis in France, SS Col. Heindrich. This is a challenge for the team as they will encounter all kinds of dangers while trying to do their job. The wounded agent is being interrogated by Heindrich in a French hospital. The attempt to get him out proves to be an immense job in which the women will show their courage, but at the same time, it will be a high price to pay for some in the group.Director Jean-Paul Salome, working with co-writer Laurent Vachaud, gives the audience an action packed film. The emphasis is to show the valor of these French women at a time when their country was divided, and also everyone felt the humiliation of the Nazi occupation. The partisan movement worked hard behind the scenes to try and exterminate the enemy from their soil at all costs.Sophie Marceau is fine, as usual, as Louise. The others in the group, Julie Depardieu, Marie Gillain, and Deborah Francois, do also good work for director Salome. As it is always the case, the bad guy, in this case, Moritz Bleibtreu, has great fun with his evil Col. Heindrich.

robert-temple-1 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.