Films on the Green Opens with "OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies"

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Friday, 01 June 2012 11:14

Written by David D'Arcy

I and many others knew French actor Jean Dujardin of the Oscar-winning The Artist when he could speak. And you can know him, too, in New York City's Central Park this week. You can even hear him sing.

As part of Films on the Green Festival, a program of free French films shown in various parks throughout the summer, The Cultural Services of the French Embassy are showing OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, Friday, June 1, 2012, at 8:30 pm. The screening is free, open to the public in the Park south of 79th Street and 5th Avenue.

To find out about the other films in the series and complete details, check out frenchculture.org and look for Films on the Green.

OSS 117 is a James Bond spoof directed by The Artist's Michel Hazavanicius, with Dujardin as Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, the French would-be iconic peer of Agent 007, hence the title. He has all the swagger of Sean Connery, plus a strong dose of Dean Martin (remember Matt Helm?) and a touch of Bob Hope, with a lot more hair, but less of a brain.

There’s no filter to suppress the racist and sexist colonial jetsam that would have been typical of a French cop, albeit a posh one, from the 1950’s.

Think of the Ugly American, then add the accent and better clothes. You can see why the project was turned down by distributors, who thought it might offend France’s Muslim community. That’s a lot of laugh lines, but a lot of ennui if you don’t think they’re funny.

Trust me, OSS 117 Cairo is funny. Very funny.

So is its sequel, also directed by Hazavanicius -- OSS 117: Lost in Rio. 

The action gets going when de la Bath learns that an OSS agent friend has been killed. In Cairo of 1955 to investigate, he’s aided by Lamina El Akmar Betouche (Berenice Bejo -- yes, she’s here, too) and they start in a chicken house.

No kidding.

What follows is a plot where everyone is offended -- Egypt and Islam take the brunt of it, which reaches one of the film’s many crescendos when Bonisseur de la Bath is awaked by the dawn ezzan (call to prayer) at a nearby mosque, and visits the holy place personally to quiet things down. His fight with the muezzin is amplified through the public address system.

The local congregation mobilizes against him. The agent’s response is incomprehension: “Why can’t they just get over it and become a modern country?”

Through the Suez Canal, the pyramids, steam baths, the casbah, night clubs and a hideout for Nazis in a pharaonic crypt (if the SS couldn’t get to South America, so they went to Egypt, or so the conventional wisdom of the time had it), Dujardin rewinds the clock half a century, although he does dance -- and you can hear him sing. He’s better than Keaton -- remember his singing in Free and Easy (1930) -- and not as good as Jim Nabors.

Somehow I don’t think this film is being shown in Tahrir Square.

The protesters, who have a great proven sense of humor, may still not want to risk anyone believing that life under Nasser was so much fun. It’s too easy an apercu to say that OSS 117 Cairo is a work of archaeology, since it does take place in Egypt with plenty of pyramid jokes –  but the extraordinary production design does reconstruct the look of the time, and the look of some of that era’s comedy — not much of it French.

The French were a bit slow to get off the ground after World War II with anything lightly political, not to disparage the great French film accomplishments of that time. But there’s a bit of envy here for the flair that came from the Anglo-Ameican world in those days, just as the French, try as they might, couldn’t make the rock and roll that the English-speaking world was producing.

Bear in mind that this farce began as a work for hire. Hazavanicius and Dujardin signed on to a project. They’re pros on someone else’s project.

Yet work rarely looks like this much fun.

OSS 117; Cairo is a farce, in which you’ll see hommages to Peter Sellers, Get Smart (not the awful film but the television series produced by Mel Brooks) and the underwater acrobatics of Thunderball, in which the worst casualty back then was Sean Connery’s toupee. Don’t expect too much originality.

At first you might think that the only thing this film redefines it intelligence.  It’s not comedy carved with a scalpel, although the constant posturing of agent Bonissuer de la Bath reminds you how grandly fatuous the French can be about their foreign policy.

Let’s stress that France doesn’t have a monopoly on diplomatic pomposity, and the film which shows them at their official silliest is being presented to a New York audience by the French government – for free. Are you listening, Washington?

Hits in France, OSS 117 in its Cairo and Rio de Janeiro incarnations never caught on with the US public (it did win the Golden Space Needle at the Seattle Film Festival, which itself sounds like a punchline), although both films were released in this country by Music Box Films.

I can still remember meeting Dujardin for an interview in lower Manhattan before OSS Rio opened. He told me that he walked all the way from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Did anybody recognize you?” Hazvanicius asked him. “Just the French tourists,” said the leading man.

Oh, les beaux jours. 

FILMS ON THE GREEN FESTIVAL
free, open to the public
Screenings at dusk

www.frenchculture.org

• June 1 - 8:30pm -- OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies -- Central Park, Cedar Hill (79th St. & 5th Ave.)
• June 8 - 8:30pm -- The Snows of Kilimanjaro -- Washington Square Park
• June 15 - 8:30pm -- War of the Buttons -- Washington Square Park
• June 22 - 8:30pm -- The Axe -- Tompkins Square Park
• June 29 - 8:30pm -- Donkey Skin -- Tompkins Square Park
• July 6 - 8:30pm -- Tell No One -- Riverside Park, Pier I (at 70th St)
• July 13 - 8:30pm -- Persepolis -- Riverside Park, Pier I (at 70th St)
• Sept 6- 7:30pm -- Jules and Jim -- Columbia University, Low Library Steps

Films on the Green
Various Parks in Manhattan

Cultural Services of the French Embassy
972 Fifth Ave.
New York, NY

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