Leonie, Actress and Spy review – frustratingly indirect doc wastes a fascinating life story

A fascinating life story gets a very frustrating biography in Leonie, Actress and Spy, Annette Apon’s documentary about Leonie Brandt, a Dutch actress and writer who became a double-agent spy in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. It’s the kind of life made for a narrative feature, and perhaps in this context, Apon’s obfuscatory style would have worked, using a deliberate convolution that fits for the life story of someone’s whose twin careers relied on various degrees of truth-evasion. In a documentary though, it just becomes unnecessarily confusing, obscuring a life instead of illuminating it.

Very little in Leonie is particularly intuitive. There’s a narration, always in the first person but switching perspectives between Apon talking about her subject and readings directly from Leonie’s writings. Apon switches between these two modes seemingly on a dime, and this stylistic randomness is all over the film. Stories of Leonie’s time in a war prison camp are suddenly interrupted by reminiscences of the resemblance she bore to other Dutch actresses, Apon jumping between tones and time periods in a framing device that has actors re-enact a not hugely exciting 1995 conversation between someone who knew Leonie and the journalist interviewing him.

The archival footage of old Dutch movies makes for an intermittently interesting backdrop, though it is important to note that very few of these images feature Leonie herself, who, as a decent spy, understood the need to have as few extant images of oneself as possible. Given how keen she is to create a sort of unknowable fog around her subject elsewhere, though, Apon is remarkably uninterested in interrogating just how true Leonie’s stories actually were, particularly an alleged encounter with Hitler that does not paint Leonie in a great light.

A life story this exciting is impossible to not absorb you a little bit, but Apon’s presentation mostly seems to want that interest to wane, to get lost in her own alienating technique. Unremarkable in its visual presentation but baffling in its handling of its material, it’s stuck between the traditional and the more confrontational, striking an off-puttingly awkward balance.

Leonie, Actress and Spy is released on True Story on 9 June.