PARIS – He’s a cross between James Bond and Archie Bunker – a French spy who always saves the day and gets the girl, but who is also a walking dinosaur, spewing out sexist, racist and other problematic views of the world.
Little known outside France, Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath is part of French pop culture, the hero of the “OSS 117” spy spoof movie. People quote from the movies. Students from top universities debate its significance. The films represent a fading imperial power that can laugh at itself and at its own struggle to adapt to a changing world.
So the release in cinemas this month of the latest installment, “OSS 117: Red Alert in Black Africa”, was a cultural moment that made the front page of many French newspapers. Starring one of France’s top actors – Jean Dujardin, who won an Oscar for Best Actor in 2012 for “The Artist” – the film immediately reached the top of the box office.
But the new release also brought to the fore an increasingly heated debate in France about humor: what can make you laugh and at whose expense?
In a society with deep rifts over religion and race, and with a late, though significant #MeToo movement, it’s gotten more complicated to laugh, let alone join “OSS 117”. It’s a measure of how France has changed that the same character and humor in two previous films in the series, in 2006 and 2009, caused little controversy.
“When the first two movies came out, these debates didn’t exist at all, or were limited to a very small minority, and most of the audience agreed that it was a funny movie and that it even condemns prejudice,” said Chris Le Guelf. , the author of “The Philosophy of OSS 117,” a book popularizing philosophy through the fictional character. “But now the unifying nature of humor is being questioned.”
In the series’ three films, the action is set in an era of the Cold War, when France “stood its ground and had influence,” as conservative newspaper Le Figaro said in an editorial praising the recent release. Whether in Egypt in the 1950s or in Brazil in the 1960s, the spy gets the job done – despite himself.
He has no interest in the history or culture of countries outside France. He cheerfully expresses his prejudices against Judaism and Islam, as well as his racism against those from the corners of the world formerly colonized by France. He is driven to seduce women, perhaps to ward off self-doubt about his repressed homosexuality.
“He’s a character who resembles our fathers or our grandfathers,” said Mr Le Guelf, 29. “Masculine and reassuring, but also rigid, and sometimes ridiculous and resistant to change. He embodies a France that is not wants to see it move forward with social changes that scare it.”
The latest film is set four decades ago, just as François Mitterrand was about to enter the Élysée Palace, the first time the presidency fell into the hands of socialists. The spy’s treatment of women is as retrograde as ever: he sees women patting their butts at the headquarters of the spy agency in Paris. When a colleague wishes him a happy new year, he replies in English: “Me too.”
This time, his mission is to rescue a younger colleague – the incarnation of the sensitive, politically correct man – in an unnamed country in “Black Africa,” an outdated term. “Africans are happy, nice and they are good dancers,” replies the spy when his boss asks him what he knows about the continent. To further his knowledge of flight, he reads ‘Tintin in the Congo’, a comic book that depicts Africans as childish figures to be civilized by European colonialists.
In the beginning, he is outclassed by his younger colleague, and he suffers from erectile dysfunction with his latest conquest, which talks about the previously unmentioned subject of the pleasure of women. But in the end he triumphs over his politically correct colleague.
Reviews were mostly divided, along political lines – with ambivalence on the left and praise on the right. Figaro’s editorial said the film’s humor was a liberating antidote in a climate of “fussy and oversensitive minds who are easily offended”. CNews, a conservative network, said, “We would have liked more politically incorrect content”.
But Le Monde, in the middle, said that “the secret agent missed his target by making the politically correct jokes.” The left-leaning Libération said the spy’s return against a “postcolonial” backdrop was just no longer funny.
“There was an ambivalence in the response because people have changed, but not the series,” said Florence Leca-Mercier, a lecturer at the Sorbonne and co-author of “Sense of Humor” with Anne-Marie Paillet. “The spirit of the film remains the same, but in the last 10 years France has changed.”
“You can’t laugh at anything anymore” is a common complaint, as conservatives say France is becoming more and more politically correct.
In France, humor is traditionally regarded as a form of liberation or catharsis, said Ms Paillet, who is also a teacher at the École Normale Supérieure. Voltaire laughed at the king, she said, as Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine, mocks Islam and other religions.
But as with the reaction to the humor in the “OSS 117” movies, laughing is no longer so easy in a changing France.
“We feel that a certain freedom has been curtailed, a certain freedom of expression for the sake of social consensus,” said Ms Paillet.
Raphael Haddad, 64, a lawyer and a fan of the series who caught a matinee of the new film at a cinema on the Champs-Élysées, said he found the film’s humor far between the present and the France of four decades ago.
“We laugh at the ideas people shared at the time, about Africa, blacks, communism,” Mr Haddad said. “We laugh about that. We used to laugh about that. Now we laugh, but with more effort.”
But Eymeric Langlois, 28, who recently went to see the film, said he didn’t find the humor, although he understood that he had to laugh at the character.
“Racist jokes worked in the first movies 15 years ago,” he said, “but now, in 2021, irony isn’t enough to make them work.”
Leontine Gallois reporting contributed.
