France`s spoof 007 licensed for laughter

The name is de la Bath, Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath. 0SS 117. Licensed to kill, thrill and amuse in a slightly ridiculous fashion - reports the Guardian.

This weekend there are long queues outside the 500-odd cinemas showing France's newest film sensation, Cairo - Nest of Spies. It features a womanising, Brylcreemed, perfectly tailored secret agent, a James Bond à la Française, leading a farcical, high-speed charge through the Middle East of the mid-Fifties.

According to the movie's website, more than 30,000 people saw it on the first day of its release last week. It has secured coverage in newspapers and on prime-time television.

'This de la Bath is a complete cretin,' said Simon Michael, one of France's leading screenwriters. 'It is a way of mocking the supposedly great values of France. It is perfect for a generation that has lost its compass but that is still being sold an outdated vision of France.'
De la Bath was created by French writer Jean Bruce in 1949 and thus predates his MI6 counterpart by four years. An instant success, de la Bath's glamorous deeds were perfect for a France suffering through bitter years of postwar austerity and decolonisation. Over the decades that followed, more than 90 de la Bath novels, translated into 17 languages, sold 75 million copies.

For the new film, the spy, who in the books worked for the CIA, has fallen on hard times. Though a series of movies were made of his adventures in the Sixties, none has been made since 1970.

Pierre Sury, an editor who has just republished two of the de la Bath books, said the agent had aged well: 'The film has made him contemporary again. It deals with themes very much part of the contemporary world in the Middle East.'

Jean Dujardin, the actor who plays de la Bath, tries to mix action hero and farce, describing his style punningly as 'a little bit of Sean and a lot of connerie [stupidity]'. The result is a character who, says Dujardin, is 'a colonialist, misogynist, macho, unthinkingly homophobic and superior even if he is totally without any culture'.

The plot takes de la Bath, now working for the French government, through the bazaars and palaces of a Cairo seething with people from the Soviet Union, crypto-Nazis, royalists and Islamic fundamentalists.

For some, the 007-meets-Austin Powers film reveals a profound weakness in their country. 'Once we looked up to great men, now the hero of the average Frenchmen reflects their own mediocrity,' said Jean-Paul Friedman, a political commentator. 'It is the expression of a country that has lost its self-esteem.'

Not a view that tens of thousands of French cinemagoers share.

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