Female Agents Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

True dark story that may scar you

French movie with subtitles.

Horrific scenes of woment being tortured by the Nazis to gain information about the normandy landings. Had the girls broken down WW2 would have turned out quite differently.

So dispite all that evil that the Nazis understandably threw at them, they would not break. Now transpose this to the US interviewing those that were to blow up the world trade centre - at what point would UK/US stop putting pressure on an Al-Qaeda cell. If you knew that they could stop an event like what happened in NYC on 7/11 what you you do.

So who is evil now?

Its just who writes the history.

This is really not a comfortable movie to watch (tho stunning).

Not suitable for buddhists at all.

Not a movie you would want to watch until you have had a recovery.

You may wonder why you would want to watch a movie that cuts a hole in you.

Maybe because its a true story.

Maybe because you can see what some people are made of, what they can sustain and what was the price of our freedom.

Action-packed, but stretching credibility

There is certainly a story to be told about the agents dropped behind Nazi lines during WW2. They were incredibly brave men and women facing incredible risks and many paid the price - torture, execution, concentration camps. SOE were not involved in espionage - just causing the maximum amount of disruption by sabotage and assassination. There are intriguing parellells between the British embrace of this type of warfare (partly learnt from the IRA) and today's counter-insurgency (though it's important to note we were deploying these means AGAINST a brutal, undemocratic and evil ideology).

Sadly, this film isn't it.

There is a thin strand of truth running through this movie - the head of SOE's French section was Maurice Buckmaster, and many French people bravely fought and opposed the Nazis (whatever Bart Simpson might think).

Unfortunately, the characters are thin, the dialogue is 90% exposition, the action is full of war film cliches, and Sophie Marceau is gorgeous but wooden.