| This week's Tribune reviews : 'Female Agents' [5/10] and 'Killer of Sheep' (1977) [7/10] |
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| Thursday, 26 June 2008 | |
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Female Agents France 2008 Starring : Sophie Marceau, Moritz Bleibtreu Director : Jean-Paul Salomé ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Killer of Sheep USA 1977 Starring : Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore Director : Charles Burnett ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AFTER so many decades of WW2 pictures, many film-makers now feel obliged to seek out fresh avenues - including, recently, an overdue focus on the oft-unsung distaff aspect of operations. The results have ranged from Gillian Armstrong's lukewarm Charlotte Gray (2001) to Paul Verhoeven's barnstorming Black Book (2006) - and unfortunately the latest example of this particular sub-genre, Female Agents, is much closer in ambition and quality to the former than the latter. It's the story (loosely based on actual events) of five French women, recruited in 1944 by Allied forces to rescue a British geologist from a hospital in enemy-controlled territory. The quintet - led by resourceful Louise (Marceau) - find themselves up against the area's head Nazi, Colonel Heindrich (Bleibtreu). And the stakes couldn't be much higher, as the geologist knows crucial details about the planning for the Allies' projected invasion of Normandy on June the sixth 1944 - or D-Day, for short... Conventional, predictable and old-fashioned in pretty much every respect, the film relies on an endless stream of on-screen titles (one of which, unforgivably, includes a typo - 'Temspford' instead of 'Tempsford') to tell us when and where the action is taking place. This is a handsomely-appointed affair which pays great attention to details of decor, costume, make-up and hair - but very rarely rises above an unadventurous, by-the-numbers period-pic stodginess. What high-spots there are invariably involve the spirited, engaging Marceau - enjoying her highest-profile role since The World Is Not Enough (1999). She doesn't get much help from the plodding script, however, which spreads the limelight among her quartet of co-stars - the real-life story involved rather less sisterly teamwork than the movie suggests. Not that this is an unambiguous celebration of female contributions to hazardous wartime operations, however. Indeed, one can interpret the film as questioning their suitability for such roles, especially when torture is involved (so much for women's famously high pain threshhold!) Female Agents is undemandingly watchable fare, and might pass muster on TV one damp afternoon - but it's disappointing to see it clogging up British arthouse screens, a prime example of the middling-at-best French movies that continue obtain such distribution while so many more worthwhile foreign films languish in limbo. That off-putting bland title sums it up rather well - so less enticing than the original, Les femmes de l'ombre, the direct translation of which ("Women of the Shadows") was presumably rejected because (a) it makes the protagonists sound shadily dubious and (b) it would stir memories of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 resistance classic Army in the Shadows (L'Armee des Ombres), not long after its very successful re-issue. Oddly enough, the film which is arguably this year's equivalent to Army in the Shadows is also on release at the moment, namely Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. The parallel isn't thematic - Burnett's movie is a chronicle of life in underprivileged, predominantly-black areas of Los Angeles in the mid-1970s - but rather a quirk of distribution. Because just as Melville's movie wasn't actually released in the USA until 2006 - when it popped up on several critics' top-ten lists - Burnett's 1977 drama, acknowledged as perhaps the most important example of African-American independent cinema, didn't obtain proper commercial showings until 30 years later, when it also found space alongside brand-new movies on the same annual top-ten rankings. The fact that a film has been (a) notably influential, (b) is acknowledged as a seminal art-work from (and about) a particular social/ethnic group, and (c) out of circulation for so long, however, doesn't necessarily make it a masterpiece, of course. And Killer of Sheep, assessed objectively today on its own merits, is rather easier to admire than to enjoy. Burnett audaciously uses "art-cinema" techniques to chronicle everyday life among the urban underclass - concentrating on one particular family and their acquaintances - with results that are often powerfully poetic, if at times a little self-conscious and over-oblique in their experimentalism. Performances are distractingly variable, the general rule being that the scenes with the least dialogue work best (and not just because the combination of slangy vernacular and scratchy sound-recording makes some exchanges difficult to hear.) Indeed, the most striking elements are the wordless, unflinchingly documentary-style sequences set in an abbatoir, whose relation to the main 'narrative' remains intriguingly ambiguous throughout - nearly as effective are the many scenes involving children at play out on the street, which have the tang and grit of unmodulated reality. A bold combination of the carefully-calibrated and the raggedly rough-edged, Killer of Sheep remains of rather more than purely historical-cultural importance - its invidual episodes may be uneven, but their cumulative effect is memorably haunting. Neil Young  FEMALE AGENTS : [5/10] : Les femmes de l'ombre : France 2007 : Jean-Paul SALOME : 117 mins (BBFC timing) : seen CineWorld cinema, Great Park, Birmingham : 6th June 2008 (press show - CinemaDays event) |
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