OSS 117: Lost in Rio

OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies is better than OSS 117: Lost in Rio.  But that’s like saying that a strawberry malted is better than a chocolate malted.  Hey, they’re both malteds: you really can’t go wrong!

Lost in Rio, set in 1967, follows French superspy Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath as he ventures to Rio to find a microfilm listing the names of collaborators during the Nazi occupation of France.  His technique?  Waltzing into the German embassy and asking, “Do you have any lists of Nazi sympathers?  Nazi clubs?  Kaffee clatches, that sort of thing?  I mean, you are all German, after all.”  This does not bode well.

And so Lost in Rio grooves along, with OSS 117 happily blundering about, oblivious to the fact that he’s an idiot.  As with Cairo, Nest of Spies, that’s pretty much the whole gag.  He’s good-looking.  He’s suave. He’s a meathead.  Why does this work?  I have to credit star Jean Dujardin, who appears to have studied under Leslie Nielsen.  No matter how nutty things get, Dujardin keeps a straight face, smarmily content in the obvious superiority of his Frenchness.  It’s silly and funny and over the top, and I laughed all the way through it.  If there were an OSS 117 tv series, I’d watch it.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

I giggled like a ninny for nearly the entire running time of OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies.

There are 146 OSS 117 novels.  The series, chronicling the adventures of Franco-American superspy OSS 117, began in 1949, went through three authors, and saw its last published novel in 1992.  The French made seven OSS 117 films from 1964-1970, part of the Eurospy genre that ripped off and riffed on the success of James Bond.  OSS 117 is supercool.  He gets the job done.  He’s so awesome that Ian Fleming essentially ripped off the OSS 117 novels to create 007.

And in 2006’s OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies, he’s a meathead.  A charming meathead, no doubt, but one so delightedly and blindly French (the American part of the character’s heritage doesn’t make it into this adaptation) that he hands out photos of then-president René Coty (the film’s set in the mid-‘50s) to incredulous Egyptians as keepsakes and tokens of his patronizing goodwill.  It’s a one-joke movie, but the picture grooves along on such a fun retro vibe of smug delight in all things French that we can’t help but groove along with it, snigger at 117’s blockheadedness, and generally enjoy a spy caper so outlandish and silly that there’s not much to do but have a great time.

The filmmakers do a wonderful job of creating an era, paying attention to details from the cut of a suit to the proper period footage for the rear-projections in driving sequences.  The move looks and feels like a film made in the early ‘60s, and everything pops in a color process we’re just not used to seeing in a new print.

So not only is the movie funny, it’s technically adept and well made all around.  I look forward to OSS 117: Lost in Rio.