OSS-117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

Written at the time of the film's release...

OSS117: Cairo—Nest of Spies aka OSS 117: Le Caire nid d'espions (Michel Hazanavicius, 2006) If I may speak collectively (and unfairly) for a moment, the French have a singularly exclusive sense of humor running precisely, if more broadly, along the Mel Brooks dictum: "Tragedy is when I cut my finger; Comedy is when you fall down a man-hole and die!"

The French love to laugh at other people. But, like a lot of conservatives, they seem incapable of laughing at themselves. When they make comedies, their sense of the absurd tends to be mixed with the noble—Jacques Tati's films are restrained manner-comedies mixed with slapstick. Maurice Chevalier was a charming rogue, but never less than charming.

But when Jean Renoir tried to be satirical about French aristocracy, the citizenry rebelled and Renoir had to cut one of the greatest films ever made, The Rules of the Game, down to a short subject. Don't mention Blake Edwards' Inspector Clouseau to them; they'll throw their dinner plates at you—if only there was enough food on them to cause damage.

The French are farceurs, not comedians.

Now, along comes this charming bon-bon of a spy movie, where they can have their cake and let them eat it, too.

The "OSS117" series is a long-running series of adventure spy novels from Jean Bruce—there's no Bond rip-off here, OSS117 predates "007"—featuring the adventures of the plucky French spy in globe-totting adventures. During the spy-craze of the 60's, there were many OSS films riding the swinging spy tux-tails, starring, among others, Ivan Desny, Luc Merenda, Kerwin Mathews (The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad), Frederick Stafford (Topaz), and pencilled-in Bond John Gavin,* made cheaply in Europe, and successful enough to achieve its own series. But by 1973, with abuses by CIA operatives around the globe, spies went out of favor. The books continued, carried on by the next generation of Bruce's.

And now, the movies have as well, taking the formula that the Bond producers used to keep Bond jogging in bell-bottom tuxes through the 70's—make it more of a comedy, dammit! But where the Broccoli family has seemed incapable of recreating the glory days of Bond—the epitome being From Russia With Love, directed by Terence Young, director Hazanavicius takes the style, the look, and the air of brazen world-weariness that Young injected into that film, and does a fairly transparent job of spoofing the misogyny and arrogance of those initial Bond films.

And it's funny as hell. It takes a while to recognize what Cairo—Nest of Spies is doing and get into the rhythm of the thing: is it serious, is it merely being archly ironic, or is this actually trying to be funny? Because there's no big joke in the opening black and white sequence, you might take the cockiness for real rather than the first signs that Agent OSS117 (the remarkably sunny Jean Dujardin) is remarkably clueless, so caught up in himself and his own shining brilliance that he's too dazzled to realize that things around him have gone horribly wrong. Many situations find him waking up from the distractions of himself to find that he's blown it and has to back-track a bit. 

It's one of the givens of the Bond series that audiences like a "007" film when the agent is enjoying himself. And Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath travels in an impenetrable bubble of self-satisfaction. He even has submerged homosexual urges that he doesn't recognize and that he mis-reads, anyway. He lives in the best of all possible worlds—his own—and his rules are simple: if he doesn't like it, he kills it, seduces it, or ignores it and moves on.

Fortunately, his enemies are just as adept at carrying out a world-enveloping conspiracy: they're not. Where the gears, switches and machinations of most movie-cabals perform flawlessly, this team of neo-Nazi's are more than likely to blow a fuse, or get trapped behind their own secret entrance. As such, there's not an awful lot of suspense (but there isn't in a Bond movie, is there?), and the only concern is how big the explosion will be at the end. OSS117: Cairo—Nest of Spies even manages to do that cheerily.

"OSS117" will return. Can't wait.

* Gavin, who starred in Spartacus and Psycho among others, was set to star in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) until Sean Connery was coaxed back with a record salary. He was paid off to fade into the background, and Ronald Reagan later appointed him Ambassador to Mexico. The best gadget any spy can have is a golden parachute.

The Artist (2011)

Written at the time of the film's release...

Portrait of the Film as a Young Medium
or
Silents is Golden

First off...GREAT sound-design.

(tap, tap, tap...is this mic' on?)

It's easy to be positively giddy over the success that The Artist has enjoyed (ultimately winning the year's best Picture Oscar). I've enjoyed Michel Hazanavicius' previous pairings with Jean Dujardin—the spy-spoof OSS-117 films—even if they were a little uneven, they managed to nail the ambiance of the films they were parodying, while also chortling over their excesses, even while embracing them. 

And Dujardin is a terrific performer, light on his feet and hitting his comedy points with deft left jabs. In the "OSS" films, it was pretty obvious that he was a superb cross-over entertainer, believable when playing it straight (if ever), but also knowing just how far to push things to trip it into comedy. Unlike Peter Sellers, whose agents always seemed to be harboring deep-set inferiority complexes underneath their pompous egotism, Dujardin was always blissfully clueless, truly believing that he was terrific, and that the strings of pratfalls, misfires and collateral damage were just temporary set-backs, no matter how regularly they occurred, followed by a laugh that was too loud and went on far too long.

The Artist has no problems of pace, or of sequences that fall flat. It takes its strengths from the medium it cherishes—the silent films on the cusp of sound, when the visual art of story-telling was at its peak and was somewhat quashed to accommodate the large pieces of equipment that could squeak and rumble and ruin a fluid camera movement, and when expression was King. The world of film was silent and focused on image—I was struck in a sequence that showed a high angle of a motion-picture theater audience watching a film being projected with symphonic accompaniment, that the eye always wandered to what was on screen—it tells its story with the directness of vision of that particular era (okay, some close-ups belie the time and the film dispenses with fog-filters and other tricks employed then) and the clean image of glamour, even to the simplicity of a cold-water flat of an apartment. 

Faces are carefully chosen for contrast and specificity of character, rather than overall performance, and one can only imagine the voices that accompany the expressions—appropriately, dialog cards are used, but sparingly—nothing aural spoils the picture contained within the frame, widening it or presenting the intrusion of a world outside of it, a point that is made quite literally at one point in one very clever sequence. One is clued in early on, when movie star George Valentin (Dujardin) stands behind the movie screen as his film ends and awaits acknowledgment from the crowd.  Haznavacius holds on his image as he waits—there is only silence—until he raises his fist in triumph at the applause we cannot hear, and which is verified only by the enthusiasm of the crowd in the next shot. The rules are set—we have to trust in what we see, not in what we expect to hear. This is not verisimilitude—the illusion of reality imposed by sound and image—this is a heightened and false world of industrialized artifice, concentrated and crystallized in glamorous black and white fiction, flaws be damned.

"...the eye always wandered to what was on screen"

But, it's more than that. Haznavacius isn't satisfied (as Mel Brooks was in his own Silent Movie of 1976) with just making a film without sound. He takes pains to evoke the era in which they were made, choosing the Los Angeles locations of the film extraordinarily carefully, to emphasize the arid spaces and chiaroscuro-deco architecture of the time (one nice sequence of a chance meeting on a studio staircase between Valentin—on his way down—and plucky starlet Peppy Miller—Bérénice Bejo, on her way up—is filmed in the beloved Bradbury Building, as if Fritz Lang or King Vidor had filmed it—straight on—as if to emphasize the ant-like activity of the personnel. And there is a visual grace to the story-telling that evokes the poetry that silent films were capable of in getting their point across without words.

Anything wrong with it? Not really, even the "controversial" use of Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d'amour" from Vertigo is appropriate (far more than it was in 12 Monkeys), with its combination of dramatic urgency and heartbreak, for a sequence it was clearly designed for. There are other films that were released last year with more reach (The Tree of Life) and depth (The Descendents), but The Artist is a great evocation of the joy of cinema, and its possibilities to entertain, even with limited means.

"...when the visual art of story-telling was at its peak"