The Magnificent One

François Merlin, who writes cheap spy novels, sits at his typewriter in his flat. The scenes he writes come alive onscreen: Bob Saint-Clar, the handsomest agent in the world, tropical islands, explosions, women. Merlin's real life is a mess: his publisher exploits him, the tap leaks, the neighbour upstairs does not look at him. The more he writes, the more the two worlds mix. The film is not interested in parodying spy films. It is interested in a writer carrying his own life into the page: Merlin kills everyone who annoys him in the novel and writes the woman he loves in beside his hero. When she makes her own decision in real life, the fiction falls apart too. The form is in two layers: bright, overblown spy passages alternating with grey, cluttered Paris flats. The transitions are deliberately crude. Philippe de Broca directed. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays both the writer and the agent, using an entirely different body for each; Jacqueline Bisset likewise plays both the neighbour and the heroine of the novel. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies French comedy and Belmondo. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a spy film. The action passages are deliberately absurd and the real subject is the writer's helplessness.