In one of the saddest movie ironies of the moment, the dreadful new Hollywood remake of the 1960s TV sitcom “Get Smart” is receiving a very wide national release today while a brilliant French comedy that spoofs 1960s international spy films — “OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies” — has yet to open in our area.
The French film is on the “coming soon” list at the Avon Theatre Film Center in Stamford, but business elsewhere in the country has been so tepid that you can’t blame programmer Adam Birnbaum for postponing the engagement.
The alternative movie business has been terrible this summer, with art house managers praying that some foreign or independent release will spark interest in the manner of last summer’s “La Vie en Rose.” So far that hasn’t happened and the churn rate of new releases at the Avon and the Garden in Norwalk has been scary.
“OSS 117” features an amazing performance by the rising French star Jean Dujardin who both embodies and parodies the way Sean Connery played the role of James Bond in the early films in that phenomenally successful series.
Dujardin is a comic actor with real charisma so it is not surprising to learn that he has quickly become a major box office draw in his native country. “OSS 117” was so successful that a sequel is now being filmed in Brazil.
Dujardin’s performance as agent OSS 117 was so widely admired that he received a Cesar nomination last year — the French equivalent of the Oscar — a tribute that rarely goes to comic work.
The actor, who turned 36 yesterday, moved into film after achieving great popularity as a stage performer somewhat in the vein of Eric Bogosian or Lily Tomlin — one of the characters he presented in his stage act, the surfer Brice from Nice, served as the basis for a hit 2005 film that was never theatrically released in this country.
In “OSS 117” Dujardin manages to sustain a parody performance for a whole movie — an achievement that sadly eludes Steve Carell in “Get Smart.” I haven’t seen anything quite like it since the glory days of Peter Sellers who was able to erase the line between “comic” and “actor” in films like “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove” and the Inspector Clouseau series.
