t's late December, 1969, and production on the motion picture Codename Dragonfly has come to a standstill. Following a disastrous screening for studio executives, Andrezej (Depardieu), the original director of the futuristic spy thriller, has been fired, and the flamboyant new talent hired to replace him has just been injured in a car accident. Throughout this ongoing fiasco, the film's editor, Paul Ballard (Davies), has been trying to piece together a coherent version of the adventure, and after
crafting a spectacular trailer, Enzo (Giancarlo Giannini), the movie's producer, decides that Ballard is the perfect substitute director.
There's only one problem. Enzo doesn't like the ambiguous ending envisioned by Andrezej, and tells Ballard that not only does he have to come up with a bang-up conclusion but, once a fresh finale is formulated, he has a mere two days to shoot it. At the same time, the young editor is having problems with his live-in girlfriend, Marlene (Bouchez), who is fed up with the private documentary—an intense, introspective piece on day-to-day life—he's constantly filming in their cramped Paris apartment. This friction at home adds to the sexual tension between Ballard and Valentine (Lindvall), the gorgeous young starlet portraying the deadly secret agent Dragonfly.
Following a raucous New Year's Eve celebration in Rome, a chance encounter helps Ballard fashion a truly novel climax for the science-fiction tale. Yet just as it appears as though he's actually going to finish the shoot, strange events start occurring—including the dramatic theft of the picture's final reel—that oddly blur the boundary between fantasy and reality.
Vintage "spy-fi" action with a message
In many respects, CQ is more a story about the making of a science-fiction film than it is an SF tale per se. Nonetheless, the adventure artfully touches upon some of the same concerns raised by celebrated authors such as Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, the latter serving as the obvious namesake for the picture's protagonist. This serious subtext, combined with sets and situations that recall such camp cinema classics as Barbarella, Modesty Blaise and Danger: Diabolik, results in a multilayered movie that's genuinely captivating and contemplative.
When Morse code enthusiasts attempt to contact one another, they do so by transmitting the letters CQ, which signify "seek you." Although this detail is only a minor plot point within Codename Dragonfly, in the context of the overall picture it ingeniously addresses Ballard's personal search
for identity. The artificial milieu of the "film within a film"—a movie that's ostensibly the combined vision of the producer and three different directors—contrasts vividly with the scratchy but far more truthful black-and-white images of Ballard's soul-searching documentary. On a more lighthearted note, Dragonfly's assignment, which involves retrieving a secret weapon from revolutionaries located in a "far-out region of the dark side of the moon," perfectly mimics the over-the-top storylines and high-tech gadgetry of the most faddish SF films of the 1960s.
Other than an ambiguous scene between Ballard and his father (played by Dean Stockwell), Coppola does a creditable job keeping the action intriguing, while the cast, especially Davies and the ostentatious Giannini, are uniformly excellent. CQ is an appealing, thought-provoking work that will definitely fascinate and engage fans of both old-fashioned "spy-fi" high-jinks and time-honored modernist movies.
