The sacrifices made by the real female agents of the French Resistance, who suffered unspeakable Nazi torture, have inspired a new film, writes Fiona McCann.
A SNIPER SLOWLY lines up a moving target. Seen through the crossfire, it's another of the countless war scenes that have exploded on our cinema screens over the years. But when the perspective changes, we see thick, sweeping eyelashes over the closed eye next to the viewfinder and long, slender fingers loading the magazine, pointing to a subtle but remarkable difference that sets this film apart from the others. The sniper is female, steady-handed and focused until, unable to save him, she watches her husband being killed in the battle below her. Grief invades her delicate features for a telling split-second as she struggles with the emotional impact, a show of feeling she quickly dominates as she composes herself to look for her next target.
Courage? Denial? This is the second World War, and both are in plentiful supply in occupied France. Female Agents, or Les femmes de l'ombre/Women of the Shadowsas its French title more directly - and in some ways tellingly - translates, is a film about the French Resistance, and not the first to give on-screen treatment to the story of how huge numbers of French men and women fought against the German occupiers long after their country had capitulated.
"What attracted me to this story was the fact that it was a story of heroism during the war, but from the point of view of women," explains its director Jean-Paul Salomé, who also co-wrote the screenplay. "It was the fact that women were at the heart of the heroic part of the story." In particular, one woman: Louise Desfontaines, played by Sophie Marceau, who is persuaded by her brother after her husband's death to travel to London and train there with the SOE or Special Operations Executive, a secret intelligence and sabotage service overseen by Winston Churchill. Though her treatment in the film has the gloss of cinematic invention, there is a real woman behind it.
"The character of Louise is actually based on a woman who was part of the Resistance called Lise Villameur," explains Salomé, who first read about this extraordinary woman when her obituary appeared in the London Timesin 2004. "It is not her personal biography, but I was inspired by pieces from her personal story."
RECRUITED BY THE SOE, Villameur, then Lise de Baissac, was trained in London and sent back to France to set up a small circuit of Resistance fighters. One of the first female agents to be parachuted into France in April 1942, she was known for her imperturbability despite the numerous dangers encountered during her work as a secret agent. Like Desfontaines, she came to work alongside her brother, who at one stage spent time in Normandy preparing for the Allied troop landings there. Other aspects of Salomé's protagonist correspond with the life of Violette Szabo, another agent who was captured, tortured, and finally executed at the age of 23, just three months before VE day.
These are true lives, and recounting their stories, and revisiting the suffering of this dark historical moment, brings with it a particular responsibility. "We are telling the story of people who really suffered during the war so we have a duty to bear witness to their lives, to be faithful to their memory," says Salomé, who adds that it is above all an adventure story, a "thriller set during the Occupation". For one of its female stars, Deborah François, the weight of history was something to be carried with special care. "I think that it's our duty, even more so perhaps as actors, not to betray the story of these people," she says with a youthful urgency, like that of her character, Gaelle. "I really felt we had to live up to the performance, not to let those people down, otherwise it would be a lack of respect for them."
It's a heavy burden to carry for a young actress who was only 20 years of age during the shooting. François' character is a fresh-faced young chemist and explosives expert, whose religious faith prevents her from taking a cyanide pill before being exposed to the brutal torture tactics of the Gestapo. These tactics are unsparingly depicted, with scenes of brutality against the female protagonists - one pregnant woman is brutally punched in the stomach - that are somehow particularly shocking to an audience that has perhaps become inured to watching the same things happen to men.
"Something that I was not aware of at the outset and that I'm only becoming aware of as I see the reaction of the public, is the way people react when they see women being tortured, or women suffering," says Salomé. "It's true that in the movie women suffer a lot, just as much as men, and it has some echo in the audience. Sometimes they feel quite uncomfortable about that. Often we are okay when we see men suffering like that . . . but we don't see that often, a woman experiencing the same thing." Torture breaks each of the characters subjected to it in the end, with Gaelle in particular unable to hold out against the pain and humiliation inflicted. "I think in the end it's just instinct for her," says François with almost frightening insight. "When pain has to stop, it has to stop, and that's it . . . pain in the long run makes anybody talk."
YET DESPITE SUCH moments of heartbreaking humanity, the women emerge heroic in a film that reclaims the stories of those who were reluctant to tell their own. Villameur reportedly played down her own role in the war, yet according to Salomé, many of the women involved carried the scars of their experiences long after their male counterparts had come to terms with what had happened. "What really moved me and had a lot of impact on me was hearing the stories of those women who survived after the war," he says.
"They had a lot more difficulties reintegrating into society. It seems that they suffered a lot more, even from a physical point of view, than men." According to Salomé, many men who worked with the resistance went on to use it as a springboard for post-war political careers, something the women involved never did. "It seems that women had a much more humble approach after the war and they didn't try to seek any advantage from the fact that they performed heroic actions," he says.
Many, like Villameur, moved back into civilian life, taking their stories and their suffering with them when they died. Female Agents re-positions these lost narratives, giving the women involved the central role in the stories they starred in in real life during the war. So are they heroes, these women depicted kneeling on train tracks with rifles trained or walking through steam-filled train stations with guns in their hands?
François speaks up for Gaelle. "No," she says simply. "She's just a girl, like me." They may be just girls or young women, reacting in their own personal ways to the particular circumstances in which they found themselves. Yet theirs is a war story and many fictional treatments of such conflicts are motivated by a hope that revealing the suffering and experiences of those involved can go some way towards stopping it happening again. Is this part of the impetus behind making a second World War film when war is still being waged across the globe? "It wasn't so much to tell a war story, really," insists Salomé.
Yet the Parisien director admits there is a message here, and one that tellingly comes, as he acknowledges, so soon after Ireland's rejection of the Lisbon treaty. "We are at a moment where people have a lot of questions regarding Europe," he says. "It's very very important to remind people that there are generations of people who fought against Nazism and fascism in Europe, and that thanks to those people, there have been no wars since that in Europe. I find it very important not just for my generation, but for my children's generation, to bring attention to that. And if they wonder if Europe is useful, they can think about what happened in the past. It's very useful sometimes to remind ourselves about that. "
Female Agentsopens at Light House, Smithfield, on Friday.
