QUANTUM OF SOLACE sss Directed by Marc Forster Written by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade With Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arterton, and Jeffrey Wright.
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Or were. The classic Bond adventures with Sean Connery and Roger Moore can still be fun, but feminism and changing notions of gender have made their pandering feel garish. In 1964, when Connery starred in Goldfinger, Bond could rape Pussy Galore and still seem like an elegant moral paragon. Today… not so much. Over the years Bond’s mix of virtue and violence, of smoothness and misogyny, has gotten more and more difficult to package. Since at least 1973, when Moore took over the role, the Bond films have grown increasingly pointless, like a dishwasher running through its cycles over and over with the water disconnected.
The Bond franchise is old enough that it has touched on virtually every possible permutation of male genre literature, and it’s certainly used revenge narratives aplenty—Sean Connery’s Bond, for example, avenges the death of his wife in the teaser sequence of Diamonds Are Forever (1971). But they’ve always been a bonus, not the motivating force of the series. The genius of Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace is the recognition that the hoary revenge theme, taken seriously, could rejuvenate the hoary Bond series. Bond as perfect man may, in the present day, seem stupid and even distasteful; Bond as wounded man, though, can be forgiven anything. The dead he leaves in his wake—not only enemy agents but old friends, casual lovers, and innocent bystanders—just makes him more attractive, adding to the inner guilt and pain he keeps so nobly repressed.
Camille may be the first Bond girl who neither sleeps with 007 nor dies, which makes Quantum of Solace seem relatively enlightened. The clubby tit-joke tone of the early Bond is gone—and with it, much of the series’s humor. But this is a movie in which the main female character is dead and offscreen. In place of woman as joke we’re given not woman as person but woman as excuse. The purpose of the Bond girl, and of the Bond film, is still to stroke the male ego. Bond changes just enough to stay exactly the same.v
