OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES and OSS 117: LOST IN RIO

The movies that made director Michel Hazanavicius and Jean Dujardin household names in the U.S. (well, at least to those who can even pronounce Michel’s last name). Not as loony as Austin Powers, but far superior to Get Smart (Cairo came out the same year and put the Steve Carel movie to shame), the films are based on characters from a series of novels (series?, 254 in all; first by Jean Bruce, then his wife after his death, then Bruce’s daughter and her husband), the first of which was published in 1949, four years before James Bond ordered his first martini. The books are serious potboilers; but the two Hazanavicius films are pure satire, recasting the hero, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, as a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic chauvinist (though still a good agent). In the first, after an agent, and best friend of Bath, disappears, Bath is sent to Cairo in order to find out what happened and bring peace to the Middle East; after a series of complicated plot turns that ultimately make little sense, he thinks he does both. In the sequel, he is sent to Rio to find a Nazi who has a microfilm list of French collaborators (set up in a very, very funny scene between Bath and his boss—funny because DeGaulle, who is now president of France, has basically declared there was no such thing as a Nazi collaborator, but I guess the Nazi didn’t get the message). Both OSS movies are tons of fun and wonderful parodies of espionage films of the fifties and sixties. Dujardin holds everything together, even when the plot is falling apart. He’s an incredibly handsome actor, but he also has a nose that is slightly too large and a smile that could help ships trying to avoid the rocks during a fog bound night; because of this he is the perfect actor to play both a handsome character and a parody of a handsome character (as he does in The Artist). At one point in Cairo he chases after a suspect through some backstreets, stopping for a Bondian trailer pose at every turn, until he finds himself going in circles and running out of breath. Rio takes the basic comedy of Cairo and goes a bit farther; Bath is utterly clueless in how he treats women and doesn’t understand why people get upset when he stereotypes Jews. Hazanavicius also does some wonderful things with split screens here, at one point filling the audience’s view with so many squares it looks like the scene in The Fly where the woman’s screams is reflected in the insect’s many eyes. The sets and costumes have the perfect coolness of their periods (but since it’s the sixties, that means middle class blandness). Hazanavicius loves Hitchcock and in Rio he channels both North by Northwest and Vertigo (take that Kim Novak; just live with it) with a breathtaking finale atop the statue Christ the Redeemer that looks out from Corcovado. For a different sort of beautiful landmark, Cairo has Berenice Bejo (Hazanavicius’ wife and Dujardin’s co-star in The Artist) as the love interest. In Rio it’s Louise Manot as the Massad member who wants to bring the Nazi to justice in Israel—a goal Bath doesn’t fully understand.

BABY LOVE, SECRETS OF STATE, FINAL ARRANGEMENTS and OSS 117 at the French Film Festival

I spent much of last week at the COL-COA film festival (which I keep wanting to call the Coca-Cola fim festival). I saw four of the new ones:

Baby Love is a sweet, charming and enjoyable dramedy about a gay man, played by heart throb Lambert Wilson, who wants a baby, but constantly runs into problems getting his wish. The two biggest obstacles are a boyfriend, played by equally heart throbbing Pascal Elbé (who seems to have only one suit and wear only one color, though in his defense he looks great in the suit and in that color), who doesn’t want a baby and moves out over the issue. And French law that makes it illegal for gays to adopt. Who would have thought that the French are actually behind the U.S. in some areas of the culture wars (it also seems to be illegal or there are restrictions on inseminating surrogates). One reviewer has suggested that a U.S. remake may be in the future, and that may be true, but as entertaining as Baby Love is, it feels like it’s been so over done over here that we’re now dealing with the issues of not how to get them, but how to raise them (see, for example, Breakfast with Scott). But don’t let that stop you from seeing this one. The empathetic screenplay is by Vincent Gareq, who also directed.

Secrets of State is an espionage thriller revolving around the DGSE, or the French CIA. It’s a convoluted story about Middle Eastern terrorists that never makes much sense with an ending that’s just plain silly. It’s directed by Phillipe Haim in the “hey, look at me, I’m a director and you’re not” style. He also wrote it along with Nathalie Carter and Julien Sibony. The director stated that it’s the result of three years research, and that may be so, but the research seems to have focused more on movies about espionage rather than the DGSE itself. The film also states that the DGSE has prevented numerous attacks (I can’t remember the exact number) like the one presented here. That may also be so, but you’d never know how considering the ineptness of the agents used here. Fortunate for them and for France, the terrorists apparently watched the same movies the director and writers did in making their plans. There is one bright note: though it’s against the law for gays to adopt in France, according to this movie, the DGSE has a program in existence to recruit gay men: of course, they have to have sex with someone like Nicolas Duvauchelle first, but it’s a sacrifice most gay men would be willing to make.

Final Arrangements is a comedy about the funeral business (which seems a tad redundant). It’s never anymore than all right and it has its moments, mainly in Didier Bourdon, very, very funny as a parlor owner who wants to become head of regional sales in Paris. Unfortunately, his plans are stymied when the head office hires Marc-André Grondin instead and sends him to Bourdon to learn the business (see Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way). The story, (screenplay by Sylvia Danton and Michel Delgado—who also directed) is all over the place and it never really comes together satisfactorily.

OSS 117 Rio was the best of the four new films I saw. The central character, played with a lot of teeth by Jean Dujardin, is the French version of Maxwell Smart, though without as many pratfalls, but with the personality of Archie Bunker, a bigoted, misogynistic idiot, though he doesn’t know it. The plot revolves around French collaborators during WWII and a Nazi still alive in Brazil. The director, Michel Hazanavicius, keeps things going at a good pace and does some fun things with split screens. The screenplay by Jean-Francois Halin and Hazanavicius, is even funnier and the satire is sharper than the original, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. It all ends with a very clever homage to both Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Vertigo atop Rio’s statue of Christ.