Film Review: Secret Agents (Agents Secrets/Spy Craft, 2004)

The French actor Vincent Cassel and the Italian actress Monica Bellucci have long been described as the "golden couple of European cinema," a title earned not merely by their on-screen charisma but by their real-life romantic partnership and marriage, which corresponded with joint appearances in nine feature films; of those, probably the best known and most controversial is 2002 drama Irreversible, yet, equally or even more controversial could have been Secret Agents, 2004 French spy thriller directed by Frédéric Schoendoerffer, at least based on its subject matter and the intrigue surrounding its execution. The film, released in French as Agents Secrets and sometimes distributed in English-speaking countries as Spy Craft, presents a narrative steeped in the Machiavellian tactics of modern intelligence gathering, offering a stark contrast to the glossy escapism of traditional spy fiction.

In Secret Agents, Cassel plays Georges Brisseau, a field agent for the French intelligence service DGSE, referred to as "the Company" within the film's narrative, and Bellucci plays his colleague Lisa; the plot begins in Tarifa, Spain, where a DGSE agent is cornered and killed by assassins who fail to retrieve a USB drive containing valuable data hidden within his body; the USB has been intercepted by the DGSE, and Colonel Grasset (played by André Dussollier), acting on this intelligence, assigns Brisseau to a mission directed against Igor Lipovsky (played by Serge Avedekian), a former KGB officer who has recently gained significant wealth and influence as an arms dealer; Lisa, who has also gathered valuable intelligence while posing as Lipovsky's children's nanny in Geneva, is ordered to join Brisseau in Morocco.^2^ There, Brisseau and Lisa, posing as a married couple, prepare a covert action in which two expert divers—Raymond (played by Sergio Peris-Mencheta) and Loic (played by Ludovic Schoendoerffer, the director's brother)—would approach Lipovsky's ship carrying a cargo of arms for Angolan rebels and attach limpet mines to it; a CIA agent approaches Brisseau and Lisa, telling them that the Americans know what they are about to do and warn them not to proceed; Brisseau and Lisa, lacking any orders to the contrary, go with the plan, and the ship is subsequently blown and sunk.

Secret Agents was the second feature film for Schoendoerffer, and it is sometimes considered the second part of a trilogy dealing with various French institutions—specifically, like police in his 2000 debut Crime Scenes and organised crime in his 2007 follow-up Paris Lockdown; in any case, the film looks like a high-budget spy thriller, boasting sleek production values and various locations across Europe and Northern Africa, featuring a number of mostly well-designed action scenes, especially at the beginning and the end; yet, all those expecting a James Bond-like globe-trotting adventure are going to be disappointed, because the film’s script firmly places this production into the more realistic, John Le Carré's world of espionage as a domain of world-weary career professionals, often forced to do some morally questionable things rather than save the world. The production was selected as the opening selection for the Paris Film Festival, highlighting its prominence in French cinematic circles at the time, but it ultimately garnered no nominations at major ceremonies such as the César Awards or the European Film Awards, a fact that speaks volumes about its reception.

The actual plot of the film is inspired by the most infamous scandal in the history of French intelligence—the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet in Auckland Harbour—suggesting a grounded reality that the film strives for. The script also plays into the Iraq War-era rift between the USA and France, when relations between those two countries were at their nadir, and the plot plays into the rivalry or even open hostility between their respective intelligence services. However, the most interesting aspect of the script—co-written by Schoendoerffer brothers, Yan Brionn, Jean Cosmos and Olivier Douyère—is the portrayal of French intelligence as not only ruthless enough to bomb civilian ships or assassinate people, but also willing to go to bed with various shady characters or make pacts with them, becoming morally equal with them. Secret Agents is "a bitter and realistic original story of manipulation and betrayal, showing the dangerous, lonely and empty lives of secret agents, where the interest of a nation is above any principle of ethics.

All this potential for a great and politically charged drama could have been realised, but Schoendoerffer opts for a conventional approach, treating the material as a by-the-numbers thriller rather than a nuanced character study; as a result, large sections of the film have problems with pacing and point to what is arguably the film's biggest flaw—the main characters being underwritten. Cassel plays a cold professional who nevertheless decides to take matters into his own hands and start avenging his friends for strictly personal motives, yet he is often given "a whole lot to do other than look menacing. Bellucci, conversely, instead of showing, simply tells the audience that she has had enough of the spy business and wants to settle down; both stellar actors are wasted in their roles, with the chemistry that once made them a cinematic powerhouse failing to elevate the script's inadequacies. A times, film is confusing, with peculiar directorial choices in terms of timing, scene duration and camera positioning.

Furthermore, the scene of the actual bomb setting suffers from poor execution; it is, either because of sudden budget issues and Schoendoerffer's lack of skill in underwater photography, confusing and underwhelming. While the film’s action choreography, including stunts and pursuits, was generally noted for its slick execution, contributing to an "impressive" overall expediency despite the serious tone, the underwater sequence fails to deliver this slickness, devolving into a confusing mess that fails to convey the tension of the moment.

The film attempts to show the more prosaic and realistic side of secret service work, with endless hours of waiting for orders and tiresome surveillance that often leads nowhere, yet it often struggles to balance this realism with the necessary narrative drive.

Secret Agents is nevertheless a solid piece of genre cinema, but it would represent a disappointment to those who had their expectations based on the intriguing subject matter or the iconic presence of their two stars. If you have some spare time, you may enjoy the film, but you should not expect too much of it; while it offers a "decent movie" due to its simplicity and gripping storyline, and features a "strong chemistry" between the leads, the overall result is an average spy story that somehow lacks the spark that would have made it more original.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

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