Mata Hari is a beautiful Dutch-born dancer, working in Paris. It is August 1914 and war between France and Germany seems imminent. However, she accepts an invitation to travel to Berlin as part of a show. On the train she meets a young German army officer but any thoughts of romance are cut short when a French agent is murdered on the train, while in her company. She is arrested in Germany but freed when the German officer intervenes. While in Germany war breaks out and she is recruited by German Intelligence to spy on France.
I was under no illusions regarding this film, figuring it was mostly made as a skin flick (it stars Sylvia Kristel) but hoping that it was at least historically accurate, thus making it sensual depiction of the life of Mata Hari. Despite my low expectations, however, it is still disappointing.
About the only historically accurate things about this movie are the facts that she was Dutch, lived in the Dutch East Indies for a while, was a dancer, was a German spy and was captured by the French and executed. Everything else is pretty much fiction, created for dramatic effect, and poor effect at that.
Her whole story gets turned into one of her being blackmailed into being a spy, doing it for all love and actually doing her best to undermine the Germans. The idea is to make this into a love-during- wartime drama, but it fails as a romantic drama too - quite unengaging.
It even fails at it primary purpose - as a skin flick. Quite tame in that regard, what there is. The topless female fencing duel was unintentionally quite hilarious though...
It's essentially a B-grade (at best) skin flick with pretensions of being a romantic biopic, but by trying to encompass so many genres and audiences it fails in all of them.
