Cinema's love story with the character of Mata Hari began only a few years after the execution by shooting squad of the famous spy. When Jeanne Moreau played, in 1964, her role in the film 'Mata Hari, agent H21' directed by her ex-husband Jean-Louis Richard, she was already following in the footsteps of famous actresses such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. The story of Mata Hari fascinates because it contains romance, erotica, espionage, adventure, and it is therefore no wonder that it has inspired about 30 feature films and many dozens more of documentaries, series or television films. This French version from 1964 is interesting because it is made by leading filmmakers of the French Nouvelle Vague without being a Nouvelle Vague film. It feels more like an exercise by Truffaut (who is co-writer and producer) and his colleagues in a genre they admired (see Truffaut's relationship with Hitchcock, the auteur of many spy films).
"Mata Hari, agent H21" begins with an exotic Indian dance on stage in which the performer is Jeanne Moreau who embodies Mata Hari. The scene, quite daring for that time, will be remembered not only for the qualities of the performer but also for the trick used by the spy who transmits a coded message through the finger movements to her secret contact, who sits in the hall and notes numbers in sight to everyone around and of the viewers of the film. It doesn't matter that they will meet and talk directly at the end of the show, half an hour later. It's the first of many details that lead me to believe that the two accomplished screenwriters that were Richard and Truffaut didn't take the spy plot too seriously. Later in the film we will see Mata Hari writing down the six digits of the code of a safe containing secret documents on a poster of her own show and then forgetting it to the place where the break-in had taken place. Such an error on the part of a well-versed spy is hardly credible. The love story between Mata Hari and a young French officer isn't very believable either, especially since it doesn't work very well on screen. Jeanne Moreau is fascinating, Jean-Louis Trintignant has shown in many other films that he can successfully play roles of seducer, but together on the screen they fail to create a believable connection in this film.
It seems clear to me that the two filmmakers were interested in something else. First of all, they were experiencing with the very roles they assumed in the production of the film. Jean-Louis Richard had written (and would continue to write) some of the screenplays for some of Truffaut's best-known films. He had also appeared on the screen, in minor roles in some of them, but would devote himself to acting only two decades later. Here he is directing, this being one of the four films in total that he has directed in his entire career. Truffaut wrote the dialogues, and we cannot know to what extent he influenced the directorial conception. Jeanne Moreau dominates the screen. Her Mata Hari seems more a victim of a conspiracy than a treacherous spy, more a romantic than a seductress. The ending, in particular, is memorable. In the final scenes, of the arrest, trial and execution of the spy for Germany, the camera moves away from the heroine, and the style becomes what we would today call a docu-drama. The best scenes of this film are those in which we are immersed in the atmosphere of Paris and France during the First World War. Their quality is due to the cinematography signed by Michel Kelber and an approach that seems to want to apply the visual techniques of the Nouvelle Vague to a historical period that had happened half a century before. These bits of expressive cinema and the presence of Jeanne Moreau and Trintignant alongside, though not quite together, are the reasons why "Mata Hari, agent H21" deserves to be watched or re-watched even today.
