This is a very exciting and effective film about female espionage agents of the British S.O.E. (Special Operations Executive) during World War II. It is ironical that it is the French, not the British, who made this film, in which only a few sentences of English are spoken. The English subtitles are really too rapid, I must point out. Apart from a few scenes set in England, the film effectively all takes place in Nazi Occupied France under the revolting Vichy Regime in 1944, where all the dangerous missions in the story take place. As the film proceeds, we realize that the underlying threat is that the secrets of the D-Day Normandy landings are in danger of being betrayed, thus destroying their surprise value and enabling the Nazis to win the War. So the stakes could not be higher. According to titles shown at the end of the film, this story is in many respects true, and the lead character played with tremendous, bitter panache by Sophie Marceau only died as recently as 2004 at the age of 98! As she was a French woman, though working as an agent for the SOE (and her brother worked for De Gaulle's Free French in London),that must explain why her story was known in France, and why it was French producers who decided to film it. The story as filmed contains countless inaccuracies of procedure and plot which could never really have happened, and some details are ridiculous (a sister and brother sent on the same mission together!?). So the story has been greatly hyped-up to 'Hollywoodize' it, by the French Hollywood, which we might perhaps call by the name of Tuileriewood-en-Seine, or Tile-Town as opposed to Tinsel-Town ('a night out on the tiles' being a good description for some Paris evenings). The film starts rather slowly, and one is not certain that it is going to work at first. But when it gets into its stride, it is gripping and coherent. There are many grisly scenes of torture by the Gestapo, which take a strong stomach, and seeing Nazis savagely and maniacally beating up women and nearly drowning them in water tanks, even pulling out their finger nails (this is done to the delicately beautiful actress Deborah Francois, who appears as fragile as the petals of a fluttering chamomile flower on a windy day),is more than merely upsetting. However, it was obviously decided by the producers that these pretty young women were to be treated with as much grit as men, both in their actions and in the depiction of their fates. It is no bad thing to remind viewers of how the Nazis behaved, and that they really did these things. There are some detailed touches which add to the horror of it all: a Gestapo woman clerk sits impassively at a small wooden table making notes, wholly unmoved by the agonized shrieks and screams of the women being tortured in front of her. As for the Nazi SS colonel supervising all of this and trying to get the information out of them, he could not be more bored and oblivious to the suffering and the screams, which to him are merely tedious. To the Nazis, torturing human beings was no different from stepping on ants. If it accomplishes nothing else, perhaps this film will make a few young people think for a moment about a War which to them is now 'long ago and far away', and why should they be interested. Just seeing a screen title informing us that the Gestapo's Paris Headquarters was in Avenue Foch is enough to precipitate a mild attack of hysteria. That is where all the billionaires now live in luxury. I have been in a couple of their grand houses, and all I can say is: 'Nom de Dieu!' And to think that it was in those surroundings, where the super-rich now besport themselves with their vintage Cristal champagne (I must admit it is delicious, but no one really needs it),that the Gestapo pulled out the finger nails of beautiful girls in their early twenties and thought nothing of it, merely finding their screams of pain a bore! Do see this film, if only to be horrified and appalled, but also to admire the courage of the women, not only the men, who gave their lives to defeat the greatest evil that befell a much-accursed earth during the 20th century, the regime of the monstrous instruments of Evil who dared to call themselves a Master Race.

It's 1944 London. Louise Desfontaines (Sophie Marceau) and brother Pierre Desfontaines (Julien Boisselier) are part of Special Operations Executive tasked with extracting a British geologist who is testing the beaches of Normandy. They recruit Jeanne Faussier (Julie Depardieu),an imprisoned whore who killed her pimp. They threaten Suzy Desprez (Marie Gillain) who is hiding her past as a dancer and mistress to a Nazi. Gaëlle Lemenech (Déborah François) is a chemical explosive expert bored with being a secretary. Maria Luzzato (Maya Sansa) is an Italian Jewish radio operator. The group go into occupied France to search for the captured geologist. Later, Pierre Desfontaines forces an almost suicidal mission on the women to go to Paris and kill SS Colonel Heindrich who may know too much about Normandy.

I like the recruiting and the various female characters. However, the mission strikes me as being very wrong-headed. If they spend so much effort to get the geologist, then it would be essentially the same as a confirmation that Normandy is important. They may as well shine a neon sign on the guy that he's a secret agent. The only realistic plan is to confirm that the geologist is held at the hospital and then bomb the building to smithereens. That way the geologist is killed and it wouldn't be obvious. It would also kill his interrogators. This whole movie feels like a badly conceived Bond movie.

In 1944, in London, Lieutenant Pierre Desfontaines (Julien Boisselier) assigns his sister Louise Desfontaines (Sophie Marceau) to convince three other women to form a five-woman task force under his command to rescue a British geologist from a German hospital in the countryside of France. The geologist was assigned by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster (Colin David Reese) in a reconnaissance mission of the soil of the beaches at Normandy for the D-Day and had been captured by the Germans.

Louise and Pierre force the whore Jeanne Faussier (Julie Depardieu) that is imprisoned for murdering her pimp; the explosives expert Gaëlle Lemenech (Déborah François) that misses action; and the former dancer and fiancé of Colonel Karl Heindrich (Moritz Bleibtreu),Suzy Desprez (Marie Gillain) using blackmail and unethical methods to fly to France and join the Italian agent Maria Luzzato (Maya Sansa) in the assignment.

They are well-succeeded but when they deliver the geologist to the British airplane, Pierre betrays the group and does not allow the women to fly back to London. He forces them to travel to Paris to kill Colonel Heindrich that suspects that the landing of the allied forces will be through the Normandy, in a dangerous mission.

"Les Femmes de l'Ombre" is a sort of French Inglorious "Female" Bastards. The plot recalls the 1978 Italian film "Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato" a.k.a. "Inglorious Bastards", with three rogue women assigned to a very dangerous mission in occupied France.

The plot is absurd but entertains, with the women having one-day training and parachuting in the night and attacking a German hospital full of soldiers in a well-synchronized operation. The characters are not well-developed and inconsistent, and Louise is a nurse and a sniper; Jeanne is a selfish whore capable to self-sacrifice for a cause; Liliane hates Heindrich, but when she sees him, she changes; Gaëlle is expert in explosives and absolutely unsuitable for the second mission. The greatest problem in this film is the reference that it is based on a true story. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Contratadas para Matar" ("Hired to Kill")