Intuition, discretion, deduction... Pure OSS 117!
With Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist primed to swoop up as many Academy Awards as it can Sunday night, I thought it meet to check out the first of his films to cross the Atlantic, the 2006 spy spoof OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. Based on the long-running OSS 117 series of spy novels, which actually produced a number of straight adaptations in the '50s and '60s, Cairo, Nest of Spies is the kind of film where you don't necessarily need to know the source to enjoy what it's spoofing. After all, super-suave spies are kind of universal, so taking one and turning him into an arrogant, chauvinistic dim bulb isn't much of a stretch in any language.
Proving that his knack for evoking bygone filmmaking eras didn't begin with The Artist, Hazanavicius opens the film with a vintage Gaumont logo and a black-and-white prologue set at the end of World War II, which finds French secret agent Jean Dujardin foiling the attempted getaway of a high-ranking Nazi. Ten years later, Dujardin is dispatched to Cairo (which Hazanavicius and his co-writer Jean-Francois Halin have multiple people refer to as a "nest of spies") to follow up on a comrade who has gone missing and is feared dead. His contact is secretary Bérénice Bejo, who is repeatedly taken aback by his unabashed ignorance of Egyptian culture, which causes him to stick his foot in it many times over before all is said and done. His other unlikely romantic interest is princess Aure Atika, who's after him for her own reasons (and somehow can't seem to resist his charms).
As is often the case with spoof films, not every joke lands and some of them fail to land several times over when they're turned into running gags. One notable exception is the mystery man in the fez who calls in every single one of Dujardin's moves, which has a funny payoff. I was also greatly amused by Dujardin's randomly triggered memories of frolicking on the beach with his dead colleague, which makes me wonder if he protests too much after a close encounter with a Russian heavy in a Turkish bath. And it's not every day that you see two men fight with chickens, so this film has that going for it as well. To sum up our hero, one of the villains says, "He's just a small spy with a big ego." That's as may be, but OSS 117's first outing did well enough for Hazanavicius and Dujardin to give him an encore just a few years later.