Jean-Luc Douin ventures into a nest of spies

The cast of this “cinema-novel” is a dream: Mistinguett, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Joséphine Baker… All have experienced the limelight but also the obscurity of the secret services, which justifies their place in this baroque book of cinephile Jean-Luc Douin (born in 1947): “The troupe of shadows”. Between the actress and the spy, the line is not clear. They can be close in the art of simulacrum, the taste of making themselves other and deriving “a transgressive pleasure” from it. Installed in this gray zone, the author attracts the reader who is quickly overwhelmed by everything he learns.

There is no shortage of daring people in this “troop of shadows”. They are sometimes stars like Greta Garbo, who had been Mata Hari in the cinema (in 1931) before working with the British secret services (from 1939) and contributing to various operations in Scandinavian countries. Sometimes forgotten actresses like Marie Bell, who became an informant for the French secret services based in London during the war. Or this niece of Chekhov, a Russian naturalized German who can be seen in films by Max Ophüls or Alfred Hitchcock: also working for Moscow, Olga Chekhova would have wanted to take advantage of Hitler’s admiration for her to poison him, but Stalin had declined the offer.

The book is like a collage. The scholarly work is mixed with detours through fiction, articles, documents, more or less hidden tributes to Patrick Modiano or Joseph Losey… A question torments the author: what could have pushed these women to take immense risks by changing skin, name and sometimes even bed if the mission required it? Patriotism? Strong convictions? No doubt. But also, the book suggests, the attraction to dirty games with others and with oneself. Jean-Luc Douin quotes Robert Musil to rejoice, like him, that there exists “the magical possibility of excusing forbidden pleasures by assigning them a higher mission.”

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