Comedy films, in the true sense of the genre, don’t really exist anymore. Sure, we get films which are funny or films which have jokes in them, but the days of films offering multiple laughs a minute are long gone. Despite what some people might tell you, it has nothing to do with “wokeness”, “cancel culture”, or “political correctness”. Films like Austin Powers, Airplane!, and Life of Brian simply aren’t greenlit by studios because they are too risky. Comedy is subjective. What someone finds gut-bustlingly hilarious, another person will find painfully un-funny. As a trans woman who appreciates a good comedy, it can sometimes be difficult for me to revisit the classics of the ‘80s and ‘90s, full of trans jokes and other problematic content as they are. Sometimes I can look past them – it was a different time after all – but it’s nice to take a break sometimes, so I end up having to widen my net a little to find comedies I can really enjoy. At first glance, it might come across as a little strange, therefore, that I’m going to spend the next few hundred words waxing lyrical about Michel Hanzanavicius’ 2006 comedy spy film OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies.
To quote Judi Dench’s M from Goldeneye, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (Jean Dujardin), the eponymous OSS 117, is a “sexist, misogynistic dinosaur”. In many ways, Dujardin’s Hubert is extremely similar to Sean Connery’s James Bond; he’s a womanising misogynist, a racist who fails to understand the countries he finds himself in and a man who sees violence as the answer to any problem he faces. Connery’s era of Bond films is the hardest to revisit now for precisely those reasons, but, by changing the framing of that character, Hanzanavicius turns him from someone who can be quite upsetting to watch into one of the funniest characters in modern comedy, expertly satirising those early Bonds and the euro-spy films which followed. Hubert is a complete fool. He womanises like Connery, but when given the opportunity to have sex with a woman, he seems uninterested. His belief that the French way of doing things is the only good way means he ends up doing far more harm than good for most of his stay in Cairo. He saves the day in the end, but almost everything Hubert does inflames the tense situation in the Egyptian capital. By framing Hubert’s womanising, violent behaviour as comedic instead of serious, Hanzanvicius undermines the credibility of Connery-Bond’s behaviour in a far more effective way than recent, postmodern Bond films have.
This satire, of course, is only possible due to Jean Dujardin’s masterful performance. One could compare Hubert to Rowan Atkinson’s Johnny English, both, after all, are deeply physical performances, yet Dujardin’s take on a buffoonish spy has a nuance which Atkinson rarely brings to his characters. Both are idiots, but they draw their comedy from completely different wells. Atkinson’s comedy tends to rely on drawn-out slapstick sequences, making the viewer increasingly uncomfortable as Mr Bean, Johnny English, or the main character from 2022’s Man vs Bee make mistake after mistake in a given situation. Dujardin does occasionally draw on slapstick in moments, particularly in action sequences, but most of his comedy comes from expert delivery of a perfectly written script. Every minute of the film is packed to the brim with jokes of all kinds, enough that you don’t need to like or even get them all. Get distracted for ten seconds and you miss at least one solid joke. Not all of them work for me, and they won’t all work for you. Like all the best classic comedies, however, there are so many jokes that you only need to find a third of them funny to carry you through its 99-minute runtime.
Although the comedy and satire could carry the film by itself, what makes OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies truly memorable for me is the lengths it goes to recreate the look and feel of those early Bond films. Any driving scenes are very clearly rear-projected. Camera movements are limited to what could be realistically achieved in the sixties, even if more dynamic cinematography would be easily achievable today. Any scenes set at night are filmed during the day with a blue filter. Along with other aspects of mis-en-scene, such as costumes and sets which could have easily appeared in From Russia With Love, give the film a sense of authenticity, which help to propel it beyond comparable spy parodies. Even the credits play into this feeling of period-accuracy, although they more closely resemble comedies of the era.
Like many of the best satires, the OSS 117 series became a victim of its own success. Hanzanvicus and Dujardin collaborated on a sequel, OSS 117: Lost in Rio, which mostly captures the magic of the original. The director, however, chose not to return to the series due to a disagreement with screenwriter Jean-François Halin over the script. Replaced by controversial director Nicolas Bedos, a third film in the series was released in 2021 to polarised reviews. OSS 117: From Africa with Love unironically embraced the political incorrectness of the first films, missing the fact that Hanzanvicus was satirising the views it champions whilst simultaneously abandoning the technical homages to sixties cinema in favour of a far more dull and standard style. The series will probably never return to greatness again. At least we’ll always have Cairo.
Image Credit: “Jean Dujardin” by Nivrae is licensed under CC BY 2.0.