OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) is set in Cairo in 1955. The French agent Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath is sent to the region. He speaks no Arabic, knows nothing about Islam, insults everyone, and does it all with an extremely pleasant smile. The character is not invented. Jean Bruce began the OSS 117 novels in 1949, before James Bond, and they were filmed as serious spy pictures in the sixties. Michel Hazanavicius takes the same character and turns him into parody. The comedy comes not from imitation but from the tone being broken. The photography, score and cutting are exactly those of a fifties and sixties spy film; you appear to be watching a serious picture. The only funny thing is the hero himself: colonial, ignorant, and entirely unaware of it. Jean Dujardin leads. Five years later he and Hazanavicius would win Oscars with The Artist, and the technique of imitating an older cinema is here already, applied to espionage. It was a major hit in France and produced two sequels. It runs 99 minutes. Good for: parody, period pastiche, and Jean Dujardin. Less good for: the hero's racist and misogynist lines are constant, and although the film uses them to attack him, the distinction is not clear enough for some viewers. The jokes repeat one idea. Some of the French political references do not land abroad.