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OSS 117 Cairo, Nest of Spies
France/Belgium 2006
Director Michel Hazanavicius
With Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Béjo, Aure Atika, Philippe Lefebvre
Certificate: 12A 99m 1As
Ian Fleming once mused that he could have named James Bond 'Peregrine Carruthers'. Such flamboyant christening would only have increased the similarities between 007 and French novelist Jean Brace's OSS 117, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath. Pre-dating Bond by four years, the American agent of French descent was forever facing peril in exotic hotspots such as Caracas, Corsica and Bangkok, appearing in more than 250 novels (many written by Brace's widow and children); the 1957 film OSS 117 n'estpas mort, starring Ivan Desny, led to a successful series.
Revisiting Brace's quaint world of Cold War espionage, director Michel Hazanavicius (who wrote for TV comedians Les Nuls before directing 1999's media satire Mes amis) has crafted an artful pastiche which works both as an amusing parody and as an accomplished tribute to the look and feel of bygone genre cinema (Hazanavicius has said that he wanted the story to feel "set in 1955 and filmed in 1962"). Using the film stock...