Female Agents

London, 1944. The French resistance fighter Louise Desfontaines fled to England after watching her husband killed and now works for the Special Operations Executive. She is given a job: get a British geologist out of occupied France. He knows where the landings will happen, and the German colonel Heindrich is about to question him. Louise assembles her own team: a prostitute, an explosives specialist and a dancer the colonel knows from his past. The film opens like a story of heroism and turns into an accounting of cost. Every woman on the team is treated as expendable, and the story does not hide it; the mission's success is not measured by who comes back. Jean-Paul Salome directed and co-wrote with Laurent Vachaud. Sophie Marceau plays Louise. The story is loosely adapted from a real agent, Lise Villameur, born Lise de Baissac. She was one of very few women decorated by the military during the war. Who it is for: anyone who likes Second World War espionage and resistance stories with a female ensemble. Who it is not for: anyone looking for fidelity. The film fits the work of real agents into an action shape, the torture scenes run long, and several characters are defined by a single trait.