Carve it Into What? German Tanks?
Happy Father's Day! I had been hoping to review a movie featuring a positive father figure (like I did with Stella for Mother's Day), but unfortunately, none of the movies I've watched recently had a father as the central focus. So I'm going to post a review of a war movie instead, which at least is a genre quite a few men like. The movie in question: Carve Her Name With Pride.
A title like Carve Her Name With Pride is one that piques my interest. Learning it’s a biopic of a female espionage agent during WWII, complete with seeing a screencap that has her firing a gun with a look of determination on her face, pretty much guarantees that I’m going to watch the movie. Sadly, the movie didn’t quite give me what I was looking for.
Our heroine is Violette Szabo (née Bushell, played by Virginia McKenna), a half-French, half-British woman who meets French Foreign Legion member Etienne Szabo (Alain Saury) on Bastille Day (though they're in Britain, not France) and quickly hits it off with him. They decide to get married after only a few days, then manage a brief honeymoon before he has to go back to the fight (this is all happening during the war). Tragically, he dies in action a few years later, without ever getting to meet his daughter. Just as Violette is starting to recover from her grief, she’s contacted by what she thinks is a group that handles army pensions, only to be informed that they want to recruit her for undercover work assisting the French resistance. She soon agrees, and we watch her train before eventually getting to go on missions, often accompanied by a more experienced agent, Tony Fraser (Paul Scofield), who clearly finds her attractive. There’s a lot of potential here, and the Wikipedia entry on Violette I read after the fact revealed that a fair amount of it was true to the actual story, but I still feel like the movie didn’t do justice to the subject.
To me, it feels like the director and possibly the script all treated this like a typical war movie, full of action scenes (or training montages) and noble, patriotic statements. Except that this is a movie about a) espionage, b) the French Resistance, and c) a female agent. Each of these individually suggest a different approach to the material, and should have meant that a movie combining all three should have had a very different feel. If nothing else, we should really get a sense of how extraordinary Violette is for being both willing and able to do what she does. Instead, you could replace a lot of her war-based scenes with a man and nothing would change. I suppose you could argue that that’s an indication of equality in depictions of men and women in WWII, but as someone who enjoys seeing female characters go against expectations, a movie that treats this sort of thing as blasé is bound to be a disappointment.
It also doesn’t help that you can really sense the Hollywood (or in this case, the British film industry) touch in certain aspects of the story. Scattered throughout the war material are scenes that would be right at home in a romance movie, perhaps about a woman married young, widowed by the war, and then courted by another army man while she fears getting too close and losing another love. It’s somewhat understandable in the early going, showing how Violette’s love for Etienne may have spurred her to want to pick up where he left off, but the increasingly romantic scenes between Violette and Fraser feel like they’re in there because that’s just how movies work (at least in the minds of producers). Even before I read through Violette’s Wikipedia page, I knew that relationship had been made up for the sake of the movie; indeed, Tony Fraser doesn’t seem to even have been a real person*. It feels disappointingly pedestrian, if I’m allowed to sound pretentious for a moment, especially when they could have been using that screentime to flesh out Violette’s character (or give her more neat things to do) instead.
Overall, while this isn’t a bad movie, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want something that’s just a little different from your average war movie. I think the real indication of how I feel is this-I had been hoping Violette would lock in a spot on my “Best Female Characters” list for the year, but while she’s still a contender, it’s more by virtue of her situation and not her actions as presented by the movie. I feel like both the audience and the real Violette Szabo deserved slightly better than this.
CAT ALERT: During a scene where Violette and another resistance member are running away from the Nazis, the Nazis run through a barn, disturbing a cat who immediately runs away. I’m not sure if I should make a “patriotism” joke or a “French” joke in response.
*Though Violette did apparently go on multiple missions with the same man, Phillippe Liewer, so that was at least somewhat true to life. However, the Wikipedia article gives absolutely no indication that they had romantic feelings for each other.
A title like Carve Her Name With Pride is one that piques my interest. Learning it’s a biopic of a female espionage agent during WWII, complete with seeing a screencap that has her firing a gun with a look of determination on her face, pretty much guarantees that I’m going to watch the movie. Sadly, the movie didn’t quite give me what I was looking for.
Our heroine is Violette Szabo (née Bushell, played by Virginia McKenna), a half-French, half-British woman who meets French Foreign Legion member Etienne Szabo (Alain Saury) on Bastille Day (though they're in Britain, not France) and quickly hits it off with him. They decide to get married after only a few days, then manage a brief honeymoon before he has to go back to the fight (this is all happening during the war). Tragically, he dies in action a few years later, without ever getting to meet his daughter. Just as Violette is starting to recover from her grief, she’s contacted by what she thinks is a group that handles army pensions, only to be informed that they want to recruit her for undercover work assisting the French resistance. She soon agrees, and we watch her train before eventually getting to go on missions, often accompanied by a more experienced agent, Tony Fraser (Paul Scofield), who clearly finds her attractive. There’s a lot of potential here, and the Wikipedia entry on Violette I read after the fact revealed that a fair amount of it was true to the actual story, but I still feel like the movie didn’t do justice to the subject.
To me, it feels like the director and possibly the script all treated this like a typical war movie, full of action scenes (or training montages) and noble, patriotic statements. Except that this is a movie about a) espionage, b) the French Resistance, and c) a female agent. Each of these individually suggest a different approach to the material, and should have meant that a movie combining all three should have had a very different feel. If nothing else, we should really get a sense of how extraordinary Violette is for being both willing and able to do what she does. Instead, you could replace a lot of her war-based scenes with a man and nothing would change. I suppose you could argue that that’s an indication of equality in depictions of men and women in WWII, but as someone who enjoys seeing female characters go against expectations, a movie that treats this sort of thing as blasé is bound to be a disappointment.
It also doesn’t help that you can really sense the Hollywood (or in this case, the British film industry) touch in certain aspects of the story. Scattered throughout the war material are scenes that would be right at home in a romance movie, perhaps about a woman married young, widowed by the war, and then courted by another army man while she fears getting too close and losing another love. It’s somewhat understandable in the early going, showing how Violette’s love for Etienne may have spurred her to want to pick up where he left off, but the increasingly romantic scenes between Violette and Fraser feel like they’re in there because that’s just how movies work (at least in the minds of producers). Even before I read through Violette’s Wikipedia page, I knew that relationship had been made up for the sake of the movie; indeed, Tony Fraser doesn’t seem to even have been a real person*. It feels disappointingly pedestrian, if I’m allowed to sound pretentious for a moment, especially when they could have been using that screentime to flesh out Violette’s character (or give her more neat things to do) instead.
Overall, while this isn’t a bad movie, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want something that’s just a little different from your average war movie. I think the real indication of how I feel is this-I had been hoping Violette would lock in a spot on my “Best Female Characters” list for the year, but while she’s still a contender, it’s more by virtue of her situation and not her actions as presented by the movie. I feel like both the audience and the real Violette Szabo deserved slightly better than this.
CAT ALERT: During a scene where Violette and another resistance member are running away from the Nazis, the Nazis run through a barn, disturbing a cat who immediately runs away. I’m not sure if I should make a “patriotism” joke or a “French” joke in response.
*Though Violette did apparently go on multiple missions with the same man, Phillippe Liewer, so that was at least somewhat true to life. However, the Wikipedia article gives absolutely no indication that they had romantic feelings for each other.