For decades women were marginalised in films concerning the French Resistance, which, argues Vincendau, stood in direct contrast to the way other national cinemas depicted female resistants in the likes of Britain’s Went the Day Well? (1942), Odette (1950) and Johnny Frenchman (1945) and Italy’s Rome Open City/Roma, città aperta (1945). [31] Even in a film like Melville’s The Silence of the Sea (see above) where the niece plays a significant symbolic role, her character is restricted to just four words (“He is leaving” and “Goodbye”), whilst Signoret’s Mathilde in The Army and the Shadows is ultimately a weak link, her status as a mother causing her to betray her colleagues under interrogation. Moreover in The Sorrow and the Pity, the former resisters interviewed by Ophüls are exclusively male, leaving females such as Madame Solange to be associated with collaboration.
Released in 1997, and based on the memoirs They Will Depart into Drunkenness of a real-life female resistant, Lucie Aubrac is in part an attempt to rectify this imbalance in gender representation. Aubrac (played by Carole Bouquet, a last-minute replacement for Binoche) herself was a history teacher in Lyon during World War 2, who orchestrated the freeing of her husband Raymond (Daniel Auteil), an underground colleague of Jean Moulin, from a prison where he had been tortured by Klaus Barbie.
The release of the film sparked plenty of controversy in France, not least because some of the basic facts in Aubrac’s accounts were called into question. The lawyer Jacques Verges (the subject of Barbet Schroeder’s recent documentary Terror’s Advocate/L’Avocat de la terreur (2007)) for example alleged at the trial of Klaus Barbie that it was Raymond who betrayed Jean Moulin. The film itself is a disappointingly conventional affair, in which the complex politics of the Resistance movement are sidelined in favour of stressing the devoted love between Raymond and Lucy. Director Claude Berri doesn’t even mention the Aubracs’ communist sympathies. We quickly learn that they are a blissfully happy couple, and when they are separated by war, she – by now pregnant with their second child – instinctively risks everything to rescue her captured husband.
Lucie Aubrac goes to great lengths to realistically recreate Lyon circa 1943, yet amidst all the period detail, the impeccably groomed and tailored Bouquet makes for an unconvincing teacher. She’s less a flesh-and-blood individual than a modern-day Marianne, a symbol of France at its most loyal and dignified. Meanwhile her husband, who’s shown blowing up a train in the opening scene to establish his resistance credentials, plays the role of the martyr, bravely withstanding punishment. On learning that his Jewish parents, who refused to change their surname, have been arrested, he weeps, his head cradled on his adoring wife’s belly: the inference is clear – the family of France will triumph over the ‘monstrous’ likes of Klaus Barbie, who fondles a secretary whilst overseeing the torture of a prisoner.
Female Agents/Les Femmes de l’ombre (2008) was also inspired by the exploits of a female Resistance fighter, in this case SOE (Special Operations Executive) agent Lise de Baissac, whose obituary caught the eye of director Jean-Paul Salome when she died aged 98. A glossy thriller, Female Agents offers a gendered spin on the men-on-a-perilous-mission genre. (See chapter: 1950s British War Movies and the Myth of World War 2.) Here four photogenic French women are recruited in England for a pre-D Day operation: led by Sophie Marceau’s nurse Louise, whose resistant husband has been killed by the Germans, they also include Deborah François’ Gaullist explosives expert Gaelle, Julie Depardieu’s prostitute Jeanne and Marie Gillain’s showgirl Suzy. These unlikely commandos are parachuted into France, where joined by a female Jewish/Italian comrade (Maya Sansa), they seek to rescue a captured English agent. Later their task is expanded into assassinating the head of German counter-intelligence Heindrich (Mortiz Bleibtreu.)
The French title Les Femmes de l’ombre pays homage to Melville’s The Army in the Shadows, yet the sombre tone of the earlier film is ditched in favour of breathless melodrama. A series of action-driven set-pieces and fortuitous escapes propel Female Agents: it begins with a fire-fight in a railway yard and encompasses the freeing of a prisoner from a German military hospital, a shoot-out in the Parisian subway, and, particularly improbably Louise’s climactic shooting of Heindrich, in which she’s disguised as a Nazi officer, emerging from the shadows to gun down her prey. All our stylishly dressed heroines prove crack shots, and all are given simplistic ‘back stories’ to explain their actions. Admittedly Salome does convey their courage by having both Gaelle and the pregnant Louise tortured by Heindrich’s men, and Louise’s resistant brother attempts to throttle the distraught Gaelle for having revealed information about the group’s plans. However, much of the power of The Army in the Shadows derived from its absence of conventional heroics, and Melville realised the power in showing the aftermath, not the actual practise, of torture. De Baissac’s personal war time experiences seem ill-served by Salome’s gung-ho approach, which privileges slick escapism over narrative and emotional plausibility.
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