Dumb, really dumb

From the country that brought you Godard and Resnais, Children of Paradise and The Grand Illusion, Sartre and Genet, comes OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies - which may just be the silliest movie I've ever seen.

I mean that in the best way. Frankly, they had me at the title.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies is a deliberately retro spy thriller, located on the reality scale a tad closer to The Pink Panther than to Top Secret!, with a hero a good deal closer on the stupidity scale to Maxwell Smart than James Bond.

Based on a series of 250-plus novels written by Jean Bruce (and then by his widow and then by their children), Michel Hazanavicius's broad farce centers on Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath (Jean Dujardin), a former OSS agent of Gallic descent, now (that is to say, 1955) working for the French government under the code name "OSS 117." Hubert is suave, brilliant and sexually irresistible - at least in his own mind.

In the minds of most of the other characters, he is inexcusably arrogant and provincial, with a condescending attitude toward women and other cultures that gives new depth to the various meanings of "chauvinism." So of course his superiors send him to Egypt, where his utter ignorance of things Arab and Muslim is sure to cause disaster.

Hubert is supposed to investigate the disappearance of his former partner, Jack (Philippe Lefèbvre), who has been undercover in Cairo, posing as the head of SCEP (Societe Cairote d'Elevage de Poulets, a.k.a. Cairo Chicken Breeding Company). His contact is the sultry Larmina (Bérénice Béjo), whom he constantly manages to offend. "You're very ... French," she tells him at one point, which he mistakenly assumes to be a compliment.

The main comic mechanism driving Cairo, Nest of Spies is the tension between the Western cultural assumptions of its period and our perspective on them fifty years later. It inevitably evokes, and comments on, the Bond movies, the universal touchstone of the genre. In #Goldfinger#, it seemed - in terms of the dominant culture in 1964 - really cool and studly when 007 saved the world by "converting" lesbian Pussy Galore to healthy, upright heterosexuality through his mighty prowess (or size or something). Forty years later, even Goldfinger's most rabid fans - count me among them - have to wince at this one plot device. (Even 10 years later, it was wince-worthy.) One can imagine OSS 117 trying the same thing, being rebuffed, and failing to see the look of utter loathing on the woman's face.

But we see it. OSS 117 views the characters around him through the eyes of a Eurocentric colonialist circa 1955, while we react to them with hindsight sharpened by the Algerian revolution, Vietnam, the crumbling of the British and French empires and, yes, even the lessons of our current imperial blundering in Iraq. When OSS 117 "shuts up" a muezzin calling for prayer because it strikes him as incredibly rude for some old man to disturb his sleep with nonsensical caterwauling, are we that far from the misunderstandings and bullheaded stupidity detailed in #Redacted#?

I would hate to overload such a goofy flick with heavy interpretation. Even as it derives much of its humor from the contrast between OSS 117's perspective and our own, it also gets a lot of mileage from mocking other elements of its genre. In addition to Bondish music and '60s-style animated credits, the filmmakers have gone to nearly ridiculous lengths to reproduce the look of its forebears, researching what lenses and film stocks were used in the early Bond movies and in Hitchcock's North by Northwest and The Man Who Knew Too Much, both of which are consciously invoked. (Likewise, a pre-credit sequence about Hubert and Jack's World War II experiences looks like Casablanca, presented in black-and-white with antique studio logos.)

Regardless of its interesting thematic concerns, the main goal here is yucks and boffs. Hazanavicius and his collaborators haven't hesitated to go outside the genre spoof for laughs: Every time his ex-partner is mentioned, Hubert has flashbacks to their jolly days together, playing and wrestling nearly nude on the beach - in, Hubert would certainly insist, a strictly manly, heterosexual, Sean Connery way. And there is another incredibly dumb gag that is so funny it is repeated several times, and could have been repeated a few more times without losing its potency.

Dujardin has the same blank handsomeness as Hitchcock veterans John Gavin (Psycho) and Frederick Stafford (Topaz), both of whom played OSS 117 in the '60s, but he sweetens it with a flash of Jean-Paul Belmondo's crooked grin. He pulls off the considerable feat of keeping us tolerant of the most culturally insensitive lout in the world.