Dir. Michel Hazanavicius, 2009, France, 100 mins approx
Cast: Jean Dujardin, Louise Monot, Alex Lutz, Ken Samuels,Pierre Bellamere
Review by Martyn Bamber
This French comedy is a sequel to OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006), and reunites the star and director of that film for more madcap spy mayhem. Jean Dujardin plays Hubert Bonsisseur de la Bath, AKA OSS 117, a James Bond-like secret agent. Cairo, Nest of Spies was set in the mid-1950s, where Hubert was a dumb but hip agent, while this film is set in 1967, with an older Hubert who is out of sync with permissiveness of the time. After an opening sequence featuring a host of gorgeous women and an over-the-top shoot out, Hubert is dispatched to Brazil to track down a former Nazi who has a microfilm containing names of French people who collaborated with the Nazis in the Second World War. Hubert arrives in Brazil and teams up with a Mossad agent (Monot), and together they uncover a sinister new Nazi plot.
Like its predecessor, this new film is an affectionate homage to and spoof of the James Bond films and it's reminiscent of the Dean Martin Matt Helm movies (in fact, a couple of Dean Martin tunes are featured in the film). But whereas Bond and Helm are cool, suave and smart spies, the not-so-secret and clearly stupid Hubert blunders his way through the proceedings, blithely offending everyone he meets and seemingly causing mayhem wherever he goes. Hubert isn't malicious; he's just a boorish idiot who blurts out inappropriate remarks and who's out of step with the counter culture mood of the 1960s. In one scene, Hubert ends up dropping LSD on a beach with a bunch of hippies and taking part in an orgy, but he's clearly out of his depth and out of step with the attitudes of the time. He's only permissive in a male chauvinist sense, in that he sees no problem in patronising women and flirting with them.
Lost in Rio is a technical triumph, featuring lush location photography, an evocative 60s score, as well as other filmmaking techniques that are straight out of 1960s cinema (including an amusing multiplying split screen sequence that tracks numerous phone calls, harking back to a similar gag in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery , 1997). In addition, there are nods to the Alfred Hitchcock films (and Bernard Herrmann scores to) North by Northwest , 1959 (the climatic suspense scene staged on a landmark; in this case, the Christ statue in Brazil) and Vertigo , 1958 (Hubert's fear of heights, caused by a trapeze-related trauma in his past), both of which recall the affectionate spoofing of Hitchcock films in Mel Brooks' comedy High Anxiety (1978). There are also some amusing Abrahams and Zucker Brothers-type action scene parodies, such as the ridiculously slow hospital chase with an injured Hubert pursuing an escaping Nazi, which recall similar sequences in Airplane! (1980) and The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), both of which featured outrageous comic action scenes played with a straight face.
Some of the gags in this sequel are a bit laboured though, with the filmmakers occasionally falling back on crude humour for easy laughs (every time Hubert meets a someone, you can predict he'll say something inappropriate) instead of concocting the type of inventive and surprising comic set pieces seen in the earlier film (the “Bambino” singing sequence from Cairo: Nest of Spies springs to mind, which brilliantly sustained a single joke over an entire scene). However, the skilled playing by Dujardin ensures that the film is always watchable. In lesser hands, Hubert's behaviour could grow tiresome, but Dujardin plays the character with a light touch that never grates. He also shows that Hubert's offensiveness is borne of ignorance not malice, and that we're laughing at Hubert's stupidity and not with him at other people. Overall, Lost in Rio clearly enjoys recreating the fun parts of the 60s spy genre while lampooning its more dated aspects, and the result is an amusing retro spy film.
© Martyn Bamber, October 2009
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