James Bond is such an outsized wish-fulfillment fantasy
character that most people who don't want to be him (plus some who do) probably
hate him. He gets all the hot girls and hot machines, he's always ready with a
quip, and he seems to know everything, because it just isn't suave to be caught
out as ignorant. Which may explain the proliferation of spy-movie parodies,
from Get Smart
to Top Secret!
to The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe: on some lowbrow schadenfreude
level, it's just plain fun to watch a Bond surrogate fuck up for once in his
life.
Which explains the many joys of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of
Spies, a slick
genre parody that sends up '40s and '50s cinema in general, with a particular
eye toward deflating the Bond mythos, and showing up him and his ilk as smug
assholes. It opens as a pitch-perfect '40s war movie, with debonair French spy
OSS 117 (Jean Dujardin) and his partner (Philippe
Lefebvre) fighting Nazis aboard a plane that's obviously a cheap toy prop. In
1955 (and now in crisp '50s Technicolor), Dujardin is assigned to take over
Lefebvre's Cairo assignment and uncover who murdered him. Dujardin makes a
perfect movie spy, with his buff body, rakish air, and compelling Clark Gable
smirk. He never lets his profound ignorance get in his way; while navigating
the generic spy-story plot twists, he puts his foot in his mouth every few
moments with some vastly wrong-headed comment about Islam or Egypt. But
whenever Lefebvre's buttoned-up Egyptian secretary (Bérénice Bejo), corrects
him, he just flashes that utterly Bond-esque "I know better than you"
smile and keeps rolling, so secure in his role as the good guy that it doesn't
matter who's laughing at him.
Part of the fun of OSS 117 is the flawless aping of old movie
conventions, from the costuming, sets, and editing to the drives through
clumsily rear-screen-projected vistas. But mostly, the film bounces along on
cheap but entertaining Mel Brooks-worthy audio and visual gags, like the
live-chicken-throwing fight, or the sequence where the camera discreetly pans
away from Dujardin and a partner making out on his
hotel bed—only to focus on a full-length mirror in which they're still
fully visible. It's Austin Powers humor without fake accents, gross-out
jokes, or endless mugging. What's that leave? Mostly just repetition, double
entendres, bad puns, and small comedic ambitions. But the packaging is perfect,
and the end results beat A View To A Kill any day.