In Charm's Way

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies Directed by Michel Hazanavicius at Landmark’s Sunshine Cinema & City Cinema 1, 2, 3

What exactly is the allure of spy-film spoofs for filmmakers? After all, the entire James Bond franchise was pretty wink-wink, nudge-nudge already, with absurd gadgets and femme fatales named Pussy Galore. Yet there’s still an odd compulsion to gently satirize the whole genre, from 1967’s Casino Royale to the diminishing returns of the Austin Powers franchise.

And now we have French film OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. Based on a popular series of novels about French spy Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (alias OSS 117, which is even more of a mouthful in French), director Hazanavicius and co-writer Jean-Francois Halin have created an impressively believable throwback to those late ’50s international Hitchcock films (think The Man Who Knew Too Much, rather than Rear Window), following OSS 117, a suavely bumbling spy, as he infiltrates Cairo to discover who killed his pal Jack Jefferson. Along the way, he tries to take up smoking and make a go of his undercover chicken business; he also manages to insult every Muslim he encounters.

All of this may have come across as unbearably cute if it weren’t for the astonishing conviction that Jean Dujardin brings to OSS 117. Utterly, blissfully unaware of the havoc he continually wreaks with a chance remark—or by forcing an end to the Muslims’ call to prayer at dawn—Dujardin’s spy manages to be perfectly correct even when he’s most outrageously wrong. And clad in an array of elegant suits and tuxedos, snaking his eyebrows into geometric shapes and fondling a pistol at crotch-level with the utmost composure, Dujardin neatly sidesteps the trap of commenting on the material and comes across as a long-lost leading man from the period. His incarnation as such would have been complete except for a few modern tics that pepper the film: most notably a tendency toward faster editing than films from that era generally had.

But for some inexplicable reason, casting a modern actress in a throwback genre role never goes as smoothly as casting the leading men. Whether it’s differing standards of beauty or the insidious influence of Botox, few actresses are as convincing as their male counterparts in films like these. As the Girl Friday/possible femme fatale, Bérénice Bejo almost passes for a ’50s ice goddess thawed by banter with a self-assured man, but there’s something too contemporary in her face to make the transformation as complete as it is for Dujardin.

But in addition to Dujardin, who deserves an award for his ability to throw his head back and roar in laughter in a way that straddles the line between satire and sincerity, what keeps the movie fresher than most spoofs is a resolute refusal to kowtow to the lowest common denominator and a solid knowledge of the films being referenced. From the ersatz Mancini music playing over the Saul Basse-like opening credits to the slightly faded palette cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman uses to evoke the Technicolor bliss of movies like North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief, it’s obvious that everyone involved knows what they’re doing. Even the insistently ironic jokes don’t overwhelm the material in favor of easy laughs over plausible dialogue. Thankfully, Hazanavicius and Halin haven’t stuffed their story with too many plot twists in an effort to disguise the weakness of their story. Sure, the climax features a few too many convenient guns, but don’t most straight action flicks use the same device to break free of the quagmire they’ve worked themselves into? And few of those movies have the benefit of Dujardin’s urbane charm to smooth over their rough patches.