JEAN-PAUL Salomé has offered us a film about women fighting the Nazis in occupied Europe. Good for him. Vintage classics such as Odetteand Carve Her Name with Pridehave demonstrated that the subject is ideal for movies. Bring on the dangerous liaisons and brutally extracted fingernails.

As it happens, Salome's film is almost as coolly functional as its English-language title. Beginning with a tasty shoot-out in a French railway station, the picture casts the steely Sophie Marceau as an operative of the wartime British Special Operations Executive.

Summoned to an absurdly Gallic version of that organisation's London headquarters (little union flags on the desks and so forth) she is informed that a top Allied geologist has been captured in Normandy. Her mission is to rescue the scientist before the Germans extract intelligence concerning the upcoming D-Day landings. Gathering a gang of like-minded lady agents around her, she prepares for a parachute landing in France.

There's nothing conspicuously wrong with Female Agents. The French leads gargle their way through the action with the shruggy insouciance characteristic of their race, and - those dodgy English sections noted - the art department does a good job of getting across the khaki wartime ambience. Still, it all feels a bit ordinary: closer in tone to the BBC's Secret Armythan the bank-holiday classics mentioned above. Lower your expectations and you should get along okay with it.