The title is colorless on purpose. But by the end -- and quite precisely in the meaningful curtain line -- it acquires a richness of shade and tint. The heroine will by then, in the common phrase, have shown her true colors. An old-fashioned, grandly romantic WWII espionage thriller (vaguely reminiscent of the Melanie Griffith mush-pile, Shining Through: nothing reticent about that title!), it sets forth a modest definition of heroism, a capability that meets a need, an opportunity that rises to a duty. Our heroine, a young Scotswoman, has been spied (so to put it) by a nondescript Graham Greene-y civil servant in a railway car, where she chances to be reading Stendahl in the original French, a skill worth recruiting for use in the war office. In the meantime, her blazing affair with an RAF flier is interrupted when his plane gets shot down over France. It is her own idea that her language facility might be put to even better use in occupied territory. Maybe she will be able to pick up her lover's scent in the bargain. The Australian director, Gillian Armstrong, brings the proverbial woman's touch to this feminist adventure story, this internal odyssey, this journey of self-discovery. (She never dwells on the physical action, the sporadic violence. She is much more interested in choices and consequences.) Personal identity is at the heart of the story -- and what better framework for such a subject than a spy yarn in which the protagonist is called upon to assume a false identity, and comes eventually to the realization that the false is the true? The spy genre and the character study benefit mutually from the arrangement. The espionage gains some psychological depth. Dry psychology gains the poetry of metaphor. With Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Michael Gambon, Rupert Penry-Jones. (2001) — Duncan Shepherd