Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
The
Spy Who Spoofed Me
(OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, 7/21/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Pity
the poor French. We Americans love to remind them how we "bailed
them out" militarily a couple of times, though without French help
in the Revolutionary War our nation would never have existed in its
current form. We call them "surrender monkeys," though they
suffered 1.4 million battlefield deaths defending their country
in WWI, while we tucked tail at a mere 50,000 dead in Vietnam. They
were 100% correct in warning us about our current debacle in Iraq, but
you'll never hear our President or many of our citizens say "shucks
guys, you were right about that one." We begrudge giving them due
credit for deep-fried pommes. And now, perhaps most galling of
all, with Michel Hazanavicius' OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
they've managed to produce the smartest James Bond satire ever. But
will the French ever be known for producing great spoofs? Non!
No matter. Unlike Hollywood's ultra-lame
Get Smart, Hazanavicius' OSS is a comic delight in almost
every sense. For those with a taste for broad, Clouseau-style comedy,
it's got Jean Dujardin as the too-confident, too-stupid Hubert Bonisseur
de La Bath, alias superspy OSS 117. A Gallified version of Bond-era
Sean Connery, he is assigned to Cairo in 1955 to investigate the murder
of a colleague (and overly-affectionate beach paddleball partner) Jack
(Philippe Lefebvre). Once there, he specializes in the kind of cultural
faux pas usually committed by the prototypical Ugly American,
such tipping people with portraits of his country's president, or beating
up the muezzin when the morning call to prayer wakes him up too early.
For those who prefer their comedy
a bit more subtle, Hazanavicius has produced a truly uncanny replica
of a 50's-era feature, right down to the faux-aged look of the
film stock. The script by Jean Bruce et al. is full of clever bits of
verbal absurdity that we suspect don't all make it into the English
subtitles. And somewhere midway between the picture's obvious and subtle
pleasures, Dujardin fills out a suit as well as Connery ever did, while
Argentine-born Bond girl (Bonisseur-girl?) Berenice Bejo is the best-looking
actress in a tight polka-dot dress since Audrey Hepburn crashed the
Ascot races in My Fair Lady.
Granted, the Bond genre all but
satirizes itself: nobody takes Ian Fleming's hero seriously anymore,
so lampooning James Bond seems a bit redundant. What OSS 117
is thankfully free of, though, is the winking unctuousness of Hollywood
hacks straining to cash in on baby-boomer nostalgia. Hazanavicius prefers
making up new and better material instead of settling for stirring memories
of old jokes.
The comedy does having a serious
edge, insofar as its clueless, culturally-ignorant spy isn't so far
from reality after all. (Check out Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial
Life in the Emerald City for hair-curling real-life examples from
our occupation of Iraq.) Interestingly, according to a recent international
survey, the French recently beat out the Americans for the title of
Ugliest Western Tourists. Like the hapless Bonisseur, they were rated
worst at learning foreign languages, most aggressively ignorant of local
customs, and (merde!) the stingiest tippers. Now there are a
few distinctions we should be happy to surrender.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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