Shagalicious

Roman Coppola's CQ pays sweet, slavish homage to the James Bond era.

By Dennis Harvey

NOT EVERYONE IN the 1960s was busy doing drugs, discussing revolutionary politics, giving peace a chance, and otherwise sticking it to the man. Many folks lived – or wanted to live – in an alternative but equally "now" '60s where the goal wasn't so much free love as it was expensive, executive-class love. You know, the kind where miniskirted British models and Swedish stewardesses took turns feeding men martini olives on international flights as Percy Faith and His Orchestra rendered "Light My Fire" nonthreatening over an intercom. Also known as "the jet set," this swinging mainstream felt most at home in Playboy Clubs worldwide and did not have any special problem with the Pentagon. In fact, "intelligence" work was its manliest professional fantasy, as popularized by that ultimate '60s groovy conformist James Bond.

Horndoggery in a wide-open new sexual era, cold war machismo, mod fashion, and the nouveau concept of camp all found their most fruitful mutual expression in the Bondian spy flick, a genre that sired as many bastard offspring as fictional James might've. Everybody jumped on this spoofy bandwagon, creating competing brands (Dean Martin's Matt Helm films, James Coburn's Flint ones), TV series (Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), big-budget one-offs (What's New, Pussycat?), and countless B-grade European knockoffs.

These last are roughly equivalent to 1930s "Poverty Row" Westerns in their interchangeability and immediate consignment to cinematic oblivion. Yet like velvet dinner jackets, Thunderbirds Are Go! lunch boxes, and Twiggy paper dolls, they are now eBay-certified as high retro chic. And deservedly so. What's not to love about movies starring the likes of Horst Bucholz and Rosanna Yanni, bankrolled by French-Spanish-Yugoslavian cash, featuring vinyl jumpsuits, freeze-guns, girls, girls, girls, discotheque elevator music, continental scenery, novelty push-button bedrooms, and no plot logic whatsoever? Austin Powers stands on the tip of a vast vintage iceberg that's aged better in 30-odd years than he has after just one sequel.

One suspects Roman Coppola knows every mylar nook and fun-fur cranny of such films firsthand. Certainly no one who doesn't could or would have made CQ, a debut feature both endearing and frustrating as slavish homage to this nearly forgotten epoch. CQ loves its cineaste subject very much, which is good. However, it pretty much forgets to develop any other points of interest, which is not good.

Jeremy Davies plays Paul, an expat American editor living the garret lifestyle in a 1969 Paris still reeling and giddy from the establishment-shaking events of May '68. He's currently day-jobbing on Dragonfly, a softcore sci fi-spy flick à la Barbarella directed by blustery low-level auteur Andrezej (Gérard Depardieu). But Paul's "real" work is filming his own David Holzman's Diary-type vérité self-portrait, which chronicles his everyday angst and relationship with live-in stewardess (yessss!) girlfriend Marlene (Élodie Bouchez). When Andrezej's newfound Godardian pretensions threaten to hijack what Italian producer Enzo (Giancarlo Giannini, cheerfully channeling Dino De Laurentiis) intended to be straight-up sexploitation, he's sacked in favor of upstart genre-trash director Felix DeMarco (Jason Schwartzman, who can't think of anything better to do than imitate Austin Powers). This doesn't work out either. So suddenly, insecure Paul finds himself expected to wrap Dragonfly, his only instruction being Enzo's cryptic "Astonish me!"

The films it flatters and parodies are 100 percent style, so it's no backhanded compliment to say that CQ gets all the peripherals right. The movie-within-the-movie is period-perfect in its cheesy FX, op-art décor, mod fetish wear, and delightfully lame "rock" soundtrack. Coppola even resurrects erstwhile international love machine John Phillip Law, who starred in Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik. While a less than extravagant budget sometimes betrays the "offscreen" sequences, there are nice stabs at capturing Enzo's Roman dolce vita, Felix's vampire-playgirl shoots, and so forth.

But CQ needs more than retro-design cred and psychotronic affection to hang on. There's predictable irony in how Paul's need to film his every waking moment pushes away those who love him most, i.e., Marlene. There's also the matter of who is sabotaging Dragonfly's final production days, a mystery resolved as routinely as possible.

Then there's Jeremy Davies. His emotional constipation was ideal for Spanking the Monkey, but that act has seemed mannered and one-note ever since. He's like a no-fun Crispin Glover – and what is that? If CQ had starred, say, Chris Klein and Kirsten Dunst (or Mark Ruffalo and Uma Thurman) instead of Davies and Lindvall, its wispiness might have seemed more whimsical, less woozy. As is, this sweet but very soft flashback impacts rather like a Bondian freeze-ray gun. The immediate effect is striking, but once it's over you can't remember anything happening at all.

'CQ' opens Fri/31 at the Bridge, S.F., and the Piedmont, Oakl. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.