Agent Marie Lautrec (1964)

D. André Hunebelle
Colour


I’ve read in other guides that this is a French James Bond imitation/spoof, but surely it has as much to do with OSS 117 as it does with 007. We might not want to admit it in our smug Anglo-Saxon way, but Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath actually precedes James Bond in both books and films – so maybe we should salute the French for their own originality in this regard. Although given the popularity of the two franchises, let’s make it a small salute. I can see though why the James Bond element is concentrated on more than anything else; as in this zany, Technicolor, bright, loud, flashy and explosive film, we have not only the over the top quality of 1960s Bond spoofs, but also how untethered from reality and ridiculous James Bond would himself become.


Brigitte Bardot, here the sex symbol to end all sex symbols, is our title character: the stunning, super, secret-agent Marie Lautrec. We know how brilliant she is as everybody in the (unnamed) French secret service keeps telling us. However from watching the film, it seems that her main talent is wearing lots of ridiculously tight and skimpy outfits. There she is doing some espionage work while dressed as a French maid (or maybe in the context of this film, just a maid), a Catholic school girl, in a ridiculously low-cut top and tight shorts as a cow-girl, and even for a brief scene as the kind of dominatrix who would give Emma Peel a run for her money. Beyond taking the odd covert picture or listening in to other people’s conversations, there’s little in the way of espionage involved. But hey, ‘Diamonds are Forever’ or ‘Moonraker’ weren’t likely to be shown as MI6 training films either.


The plot is similarly full of Bond spoof ludicrousness, involving as it does flies with cameras on their backs, de-thawed hibernating Nazis who just can’t get their feet warm, robotic dragons piloted by midgets and an attempt to crash the moon into North America. It’s all stupendously and utterly bonkers. This is a movie which would look at the concept of a mad, bald super villain living in a hollowed out volcano and decide it wanted to steer away from such social realism. But then ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’ doesn’t want you to concentrate on the plot, it exists for loud colours, cackling villains and Brigitte Bardot pouting and playing with her hair while dressed in very little.
But elsewhere in the movie we have the odd contrast of the lovely French chanteuse, Francoise Hardy, as a colleague of Bardot’s and a possible double agent. In the restraint of her performance, in how demure her outfits are in comparison with the star, we have a glimpse of a whole other film.


Whereas Bardot is predicting Bond at its most unrestrained, Hardy seems to want to play a part in a particularly dour John Le Carre adaptation. Her more reigned in performance slows the film down and the scenes between her and Bardot are absolutely beautiful. Yes, its style clashing with brassiness, but it’s also that rare moment when the film allows itself to breathe, giving us something actually tense and interesting. Predictably these scenes also have a distinct lesbian edge, which at the time I thought it might just be the French being the French, although as we’ll see in the next film – it was a trait 1960s female-led adventure films seemed really eager to explore.