OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006)

Michel Hazanavicius approaches the 1950s spy picture as an archaeologist approaches a fragile bone fragment, and OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies is the result: a loving, deadpan reconstruction of Eurospy cinema that also happens to be a comedy of colonial bad manners. Jean Dujardin's Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath is an idiot in a tailored suit, a French agent who insults a muezzin, confuses the Suez Canal with pyramid labor, and treats Islam as a passing fad. The film's satirical target is Western arrogance, and it hits that target often enough. The trouble is that the target and the joke keep swapping places.

On social consciousness, the film is a modest, muddled specimen. The Cairo setting supplies a large Middle Eastern and North African supporting cast, but the players are period furniture, not a statement. Larmina is described as the brain of the team, yet her most memorable scene is a clothes-ripping catfight that the movie stages with leering relish. The homoerotic flashbacks with Jack and the casual homophobia exist as parody of 1960s machismo, which is not the same as progressive inclusion. Racial satire lands with an ambiguous thud because the script invites us to laugh at the racism and with it. A poultry-market subplot gestures at greed, then evaporates. No climate concerns, no body-positivity arc, no neurodivergent character, and no revisionist history appear. The Suez crisis is backdrop, not thesis.

What keeps the enterprise from becoming a sermon is its commitment to farce. The film has no lecture energy worth measuring, and its politics arrive through slapstick, rear projection, and live chickens. That is the saving grace. It is a clever pastiche with a queasy streak, a vintage bottle that tastes of cologne and bad faith. We can admire the tailoring while noting the stains.