★★★
“Life during wartime”
There’s no denying the extraordinary bravery shown by female agents in Britain’s Special Operations Executive during World War 2. Largely operating in occupied France, they coordinated sabotage activities, ran communications and generally did everything their male counterparts did. The risks they ran were certainly no less, with about one in three not surviving. We’ve previously had a few articles about them, both fictional depictions such as Wish Me Luck, and more factually oriented accounts, like Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story. This occupies a middle ground. The characters are real: SOE agents Khan (Apte) and Virginia Hall (Thomas) – an American with, I kid you not, an artificial leg – and Vera Atkins, the woman who recruited and ran them. But it takes a dramatic rather than a documentarian approach.
I think my knowledge going in probably slightly weakened my appreciation for the film. Knowing the stories of Khan and Hall, and their eventual fates, largely robbed this of much tension. However, there is still a good deal to enjoy. This may run 124 minutes, but it never drags, maintaining a solid pace throughout. Indeed, perhaps too solid; you could argue for a lack of escalation, the film having nothing identifiable as a climax. That doesn’t stop it from being consistently entertaining, anchored by a trio of good performances. Katic, sporting an impressive English accent, is perhaps the stand-out as Atkins. She has to deal not just with the chauvinism inherent in the era, but also having her loyalty questioned due to her background as a Romanian Jew. Anti-semitism at the time was not confined to the continent.
The bulk of the drama comes from the other two, and the contrast in personalities could not be more marked. Khan has the near-perpetual look of a deer caught in headlights, while Hall, in her cover as a journalist, possesses a calm assurance. However, they both prove to be equally good at buckling down and getting the job done, dodging danger and almost certain death, in the form of the Nazis, on an almost daily basis – something the film certainly puts over. Stylistically, in some ways it almost feels like a two-hour long montage; there are not many extended scenes to propel the narrative, with instead, sequences cutting together the two women’s lives in occupied France.
It’s still effective, and may have been needed to work around the need for some tampering with timelines. It’s not obvious that less than four months passed between Khan landing and being captured, while Hall spent more than fifteen months in action, before having to flee over the Pyrenees into Spain (not the easiest of treks, given her disability). These and other cinematic conceits are forgivable, and all told, this is respectable enough, and very respectful of its heroines. I tend to think though, that this may be a case where the facts are more impressive than any fiction could ever be,
Dir: Lydia Dean Pilcher
Star: Sarah Megan Thomas, Stana Katic, Radhika Apte, Linus Roache