War in the Shadows

Director Jean-Paul Salomé has said that he got the idea for his new film Female Agents (original title Les Femmes de l’Ombre—Women in the Shadows) in 2004 when he read the Times obituary of April 24 for Lise Villameur, who had died aged ninety-eight. From 1942 to 1945 as Lise de Baissac she had been the only female agent to run her own network in occupied France for the British Special Operations Executive.

It is easy to see why Salomé found her story so fascinating. De Baissac had been a formidable agent who had played a major part in sabotaging German transport after D-Day. Also, judging from the official photographs, she was very beautiful, with a striking resemblance to Michele Morgan, one of the great French film stars of the period. It was an ideal part for the extraordinary Sophie Marceau, who at forty-one is about the same age as de Baissac was when she was operating as an agent in 1944—and Marceau is equally if not more attractive. Nevertheless Salomé elected not to use de Baissac’s real story. Instead Female Agents is skilfully crafted historical fiction that uses aspects of the agent’s real personality—Marceau gets the authority and charisma implicit in contemporary accounts of the lady just about right—but also includes the experiences of other women who worked in the underground.

In some ways this is a pity. Certainly de Baissac did say, “What was needed was cold-blooded efficiency for long weary months, not outbursts of heroism”—the antithesis of the currently fashionable action-packed film narratives. Still the safe house she set up in Poitiers after parachuting into France in 1942 was next to Gestapo headquarters; and de Baissac held regular parties there so the regular comings and goings of agents would not appear unusual. (Perhaps this was too much like a Hollywood spy thriller for Salomé.) As well, she took part in attacks on German troops.

However, the director believed the vital role women agents played in the Resistance had been overlooked for far too long. “When the war was over, General de Gaulle accorded little importance to the role women played. Out of the more than 1000 Liberation Crosses that were awarded, only six went to women,” Salomé has said. Presumably the adventures of one extraordinary agent would not be enough. So Salomé and his co-writer, Laurent Vachaud, devised the fiction of a virtually all-woman operation.

A British army geologist who has been reconnoitring the Normandy beaches is in danger of being captured by SS Colonel Heinrich (Moritz Bleibtreu). Louise (Marceau in the de Baissac part) and her brother Pierre (Julien Boisselier) are ordered to recruit a team of women, Jeanne (Julie Depardieu), Suzy (Marie Gillain) and Gaëlle (Déborah François), to rescue him. At first everything goes according to plan, but then they have to undertake a new mission—the assassination of Heinrich himself.

There were almost certainly no all-women operations in 1944. This is just a device to encompass a range of experiences involving women agents. But the plot is so well crafted, albeit somewhat hectic, that when watching the film you barely notice the contrivance. Moreover, the background is entirely accurate. The Allies did employ floating harbours and took many samples from beaches in Normandy before the landings, as in the film. There were deception plans that convinced the Germans that the landings were to be at Calais, and these could have been compromised had an agent taking samples from the beaches been captured. What’s more, on June 2, 1944, Rommel was en route to Germany and could have been intercepted, as Heinrich tries to do in the movie. Louise and Pierre are based on de Baissac and her brother Claude—Boisselier is even given the same kind of moustache—who were working together before the invasion. But their back story—collaborationist father defied by both of them to join the Resistance plus a tense sibling rivalry—is invented; as is Louise’s communist husband killed in the opening sequence. (The aristocratic de Baissac would never have contemplated marrying anyone from the Left.) Nevertheless, their brother-and-sister relationship is true to the period and Marceau and Boisselier make their scenes together profoundly moving.

Equally powerful are the sub-plots involving Jeanne, a prostitute condemned to death for murdering her pimp, who is promised a pardon if the operation is a success; Suzy, the collaborator in love with Heinrich coerced into a plot to assassinate him; and the idealistic Gaëlle, resolute and courageous in the field but unable to withstand torture.

These torture sequences are the most disturbing in the film. For some they are literally unwatchable. My regular companion for screenings such as these had her hands over her eyes. I asked why she found the torture scenes so upsetting when she had been unruffled by the violence in Beowulf and Dark Knight. “But these are too, too true,” she replied. My friend was right, and in a way her response is a compliment to Salomé and his colleagues. Everything we see comes from the oral history: Gaëlle wetting herself with fear; pulling out fingernails with pliers (inflicted on Odette Churchill and almost certainly Violette Szabo); the brutal beatings; and the water boarding (still being used by our American allies). The film also portrays the appalling dilemma that confronted many Catholics facing torture whose faith prevented them from using a suicide pill. One of the film’s most haunting scenes is when the devout Gaëlle takes the suicide pill she has been given by Louise, naked before her God, lying in the position of the crucified Christ.

My friend’s reaction notwithstanding, Salomé’s treatment of this material is never excessive. He registers the horror then moves on. What makes these scenes so appalling is that the torture is being inflicted on believable characters as a grim duty by the frighteningly plausible Heinrich. The action sequences, too, are always credible with the emphasis on the characters and, as the film unfolds, the duel to the death between Louise and Heinrich.

My one criticism is that for all Female Agents’ admirable concision and fast-paced narrative, Salomé had such good material that he could have explored some of the situations in greater depth. Still Gillain, Depardieu and François are all so good that the characters never become stereotypes. Above all, Sophie Marceau creates what will, I believe, soon come to be recognised as one of French cinema’s great heroines: stoic, tough, compassionate, entirely worthy of the extraordinary woman who inspired Jean-Paul Salomé to create this near-masterpiece.

Female Agents is historical fiction. Jean-Pierre Melville’s two films portraying the French Resistance, Army of Shadows (L’Armée des Ombres) and Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la Mer) are historical documents. They are also great art, and fortunately they have been released on DVD in scholarly editions as part of the Criterion Collection.

Of course, just about any film is a historical source of some kind. Melville’s Resistance films are significant because unlike many postwar film-makers the director endeavoured to recreate the recent past as authentically as possible. The notes and special features of the Criterion release describe how Melville persuaded Vercors, the author of Silence of the Sea, not only to let him undertake a film adaptation of the novel, but also to allow him to shoot in his house, where the incident on which the book was based took place. According to Melville, a German officer had stayed in Vercors’ home, limped as in the film and novel, his room was full of books and instead of a portrait of Hitler had a bust of Pascal.

The novel, faithfully transposed into the film, develops this incident further. A German lieutenant is billeted in the house of an old man and his niece. From the books lining the walls of his study we assume the “host” (like Vercors) is a man of letters. Although the German is gracious and cultured they refuse to speak to him. It is the only resistance open to them and is respected as such by the German officer. In one beautifully written scene, when the uncle has to visit the office of the local German administration, the lieutenant does not force the issue so the old man has to state his business to him and leaves the matter to a subordinate. Melville uses both the officer’s long monologues from the novel and the old man’s narration.

At first their visitor tries to win them over, describing his admiration for French culture and how he looks forward to a golden age when the arts and people in each of their countries will be revitalised by contact with the other. This is exposed as a delusion when the lieutenant goes on two leaves to Paris. Melville expertly matches shots of Swiss actor Howard Vernon, playing the lieutenant, clad in a German uniform walking around 1947 Paris, with actuality footage of the city during the German occupation. “We were liable to find ourselves being beaten up at any moment because … only two years earlier the Germans had been there,” Melville recalled. The scenes at the Kommadantur were shot at the actual location, as the director wanted viewers to see the Paris Opera in the background. At first the German sees only the monuments to French culture and history. Then he becomes aware of his compatriots. At a soiree the lieutenant hears about the Nazi plans to degrade French art and literature by using some of the French artists themselves: “Oh, we’ll flatter them.” The director got Vercors’ permission to include here a reference to Treblinka—Melville was Jewish and acutely aware of Vichy’s collaboration with Hitler’s Final Solution.

Appalled, on his return the lieutenant admits to the still silent French couple that he has been terribly wrong and all he can do is go back into action. As he departs he sees a newspaper left for him by the uncle with a quotation from Anatole France as a headline: “It is a noble thing for a soldier to disobey a criminal order”. This was another invention by Melville. The quotation was from a real headline of the time that had appeared in L’Humanite referring to Marty and Tillon, the French sailors who had mutinied when ordered to bombard the Red Army. It is an attempt by the uncle to reclaim this man and perhaps apologise for any personal injustice he may have inflicted by choosing to remain silent.

Eric von Stroheim as von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion had portrayed an honourable and chivalrous German enemy, as did Conrad Veidt in Victor Saville’s Dark Journey and Michael Powell’s The Spy in Black. What made Silence special at the time of its first release in 1949 is that it portrayed an honourable form of resistance for those unable to take up arms. In addition it expressed the attitudes of the Resistance itself. Nicole Stéphane (the niece), Jean-Marie Robain (the uncle), Melville and Vercors had all been in the Resistance.

To secure the rights from Vercors, Melville had agreed to submit the film before it was released to a panel of eminent Resistance fighters, and if they disapproved to destroy the negative. They approved and the film became a great success. Clearly the French wanted to remember the Occupation as a time when everyone redeemed the “strange defeat” of their country by defying the conquerors. As the film scholar Ginette Vincendeau points out on the DVD, this is a myth. For all the sacrifices of the Resistance and the efforts of Allied propagandists, France was not a resistant country. Melville meticulously recreates an authentic encounter that almost certainly represented similar events throughout occupied Europe, but as his changes to Vercors’ original suggest he, more than anyone, knew he was not telling the whole story.

This became apparent when in the late 1960s he filmed, as he put it, the novel of the Resistance, Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows. Like Silence it was published clandestinely in France during the war, and quickly translated into English by Haakon Chevalier. The book was made up of a series of experiences collected by Kessel mainly while he was working for the Resistance in London. As he wrote in the introduction:

“It was my good fortune to have in France as friends men like Gerbier, Lemasque or Felix la Tonsure. But in London I was able to see the French Resistance in its most vivid light … the obligation of secrecy, the fact of being hunted quarry, make all encounters on the native soil difficult and precarious. In London one can meet and talk freely.”

And indeed the novel moves between virtual anecdotes—almost certainly versions of stories related to Kessel in London—and tautly written third-person descriptions of the adventures of Resistance fighters. Many key events are described to one or other of the characters, reflecting the way information circulated in the underground.

Melville was faithful to the spirit and much of the detail in Kessel’s original, but by the late sixties he was at the peak of his career. The much-discussed minimalist style—classically composed shots, sequences allowed to play out in real time, foreground and background in exact focus and the famous gestures that convey so much—was now fully developed and well suited to Kessel’s spare prose. What’s more, Melville had his own memories of the Resistance and knew that in 1943 Kessel had gone to great lengths to obscure the details of actual operations. So although the novel’s composite characters are retained, the film includes new material.

The opening follows the original up to the escape, but then Melville employs an incident described to him by Paul Riviere (a schoolteacher wounded in the fighting in 1940), filmed it on the actual location, the opulent Hotel Majestic, then added the encounter with a helpful barber from later in the book. The director also found an exact model for the mysterious Chief, Luc Jardie (Paul Meurisse), in the philosopher and mathematician Jean Cavailles, shot by the Gestapo in 1944. A note in the DVD special edition describes how he used the exact titles of Cavailles’ works for the books by Luc Jardie that Gerbier reads when he is hiding out.

In the extract from the long out-of-print Melville on Melville reproduced as part of the notes, Melville explains that Luc Jardie’s journey to London to be decorated by de Gaulle was based on the description in the memoirs of the Free French intelligence chief Colonel Passy of the investiture of Jean Moulin by the general. In addition Melville persuaded Colonel Passy to play himself in the movie and included exterior shots of the real Free French headquarters. However, Gerbier and Jean-Luc’s exchange after seeing Gone with the Wind, “The day the French can see that film … the war will be over”, was really between Melville and Pierre Broussolette. Broussolette was the Resistance leader who threw himself from the window of Gestapo headquarters to avoid betraying his networks under torture. This may be why Melville chose to portray the torture indirectly, showing the victims before and after their ordeals, using the chair to which they are bound as a symbol.

None of this violates the spirit of the novel, but by 1969 neither Melville nor Kessel could believe in the book’s guarded optimism. Too much was known or suspected about the betrayal of de Gaulle’s emissary, Jean Moulin, into the hands of the infamous Butcher of Lyons, Klaus Barbie. (French audiences would have easily recognised that much of the film’s action was set in Lyons.) When in the final title Jean-Luc is described as giving up one name, his own, Melville is alluding to the legend that when the dying Moulin was shown a piece of paper with his name spelt “Moulins”, he asked for a pencil and scribbled out the “s”. Then there were the betrayals. Certainly many were because of the kind of torture portrayed in Female Agents, but even more were the result of anonymous denunciations by friends and neighbours. Melville alludes to this when Jean-Pierre Cassel’s Jean François denounces himself so he can get into prison to help his friend Felix. This was as far as the director thought he could go but he did transform Kessel’s patriotic epic into a tragedy and there is the smell of fear throughout the final scenes of the film.

In spite of these limitations Army of Shadows is arguably the greatest Resistance film of them all. More than any other film I have seen, it appears to capture the reality of what it must have been like to live underground in 1942. Paul Meurisse, Lino Ventura as Gerbier, and Simone Signoret as the tragically compromised Mathilde are all beyond praise, as is cinematographer Pierre L’Homme, who supervised the restoration. Ventura especially—stoic, powerful, contained—creates one of the last century’s great authority figures. It took Melville nine years to persuade Ventura to take the part and by then actor and director were not on speaking terms. Still, as Melville said, “Ventura was Gerbier.”

Where then does Female Agents come in the cycle of Resistance films? We will have to wait for the release and restoration of more of the immediate postwar films such as H.G. Clouzot’s Manon for a final answer. Certainly for all Female Agents’ impeccable period detail, Salomé is a very different director from Melville. Female Agents is much faster paced and is photographed in the currently fashionable “modern” style: tight framing fluid camera movement with an occasional focus pull to make certain viewers look where they are meant to. Above all it is a melodrama. Still it does overdue justice to at least some of the heroines of Special Operations; and perhaps for the first time portrays the cruelty and degradation of the Nazis’ addiction to torture. Above all in Sophie Marceau’s Louise we have a heroine who can stand beside Lino Ventura’s Gerbier—a considerable achievement by any standards.

Neil McDonald writes: I am deeply indebted to Piers Laverty for making available the currently out-of-stock Le Silence de la Mer and the Criterion edition of Army of Shadows. Among the latter’s special features are interviews with Melville himself and Colonel Passy. As well, Bertrand Tavernier provides a witty description of Jean-Pierre’s on-set antics—next to Melville, John Ford was a pussycat.