In the summer of 1996, film director Olivier Assayas made a film about a French film director who wants to make a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915 silent film thriller series The Vampires. “Irma Vep” was his commentary on cinema and his own work, his “Eight and a Half”, his “The Player”, his “American Night”. Assayas began an affair on the set of his film with actress Maggie Cheung, whom the fictional director – portrayed by Nouvelle Vague icon Jean-Pierre Léaud – brought from Hong Kong to Paris to play the role of spy Irma Vep; later she became his wife for a short time.
Now, Olivier Assayas has remade Irma Vep for HBO in the form of an eight-part miniseries. Is it possible to push the mirror battle between film and life even further? You can, and the series format of the streaming services and pay channels is the ideal instrument for this, as “Irma Vep” proves. His alter ego, once again named René Vidal, is now played by Assayas’ favorite actor Vincent Macaigne, and is still reeling from his failed marriage to a Hong Kong movie star, whom he fell in love with on the set of an earlier Vampire remake. And the production chaos of the “Irma Vep” feature film is back, the crises, the nervous breakdowns, the love wars among the actors, the intervention of a substitute director. That sounds like self-orbiting of the autistic kind. But Irma Vep, a remake of a remake, is anything but.
Because the constellation has shifted in a meaningful way. The story begins with a Hollywood star being hired to give the production a chance on the international television market. When Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander) arrives in Paris, she becomes the focus of a cinematic family constellation in which everyone involved projects their needs onto her. Vidal needs her for his grieving process and to restart his career. The costume designer Zoe (Jeanne Balibar) is looking for a love object in her and thus becomes the rival of Mira’s assistant Regina. And the drug-addicted German actor Gottfried (Lars Eidinger) explores the boundary between art and life with Mira on the set, which earns him the envy of his French colleague Robert (Hippolyte Girardot) and his director, allegations of abuse by two MeToo activists.
Balance sheet of the visual medium in its time
In addition, Mira (whose name is an anagram of her character) has the ghosts of her own life breathing down her neck: an agent who wants to bring her back to Hollywood sooner rather than later for the next big project; an ex-boyfriend who is also in France for filming and tries to use this coincidence to revive the relationship; and an ex-girlfriend (Adria Arjona) who torments her in such a lascivious way that you can hardly get enough of the duel between the two.
It’s the ingredients of a soap opera, and Irma Vep would certainly have been one if Assayas hadn’t had something entirely different in mind with his material. He actually wanted to take stock of the visual medium of his time, not only of cinema in its economic decline, but also of the hybrid, pseudo-epic forms that flourished on some streaming platforms. That’s why it’s both desperate coquetry and a nod to Feuillade when he lets René Vidal tell his psychotherapist that “Irma Vep” isn’t a TV series at all, but a film in eight parts. In the case of Feuillade, whose ten-part “Vampires” ran en bloc in Parisian cinemas, that was still true; here it is an illusion. “Irma Vep” is also so funny because the situation that Assayas describes actually makes you cry. Actually – but not here. In the scenes that Vidal shoots on the set of Irma Vep (until he’s replaced by a Hollywood pro), old cinema is resurrected with its love of history and momentary decor: the sparkling interiors, the costumes and sets, the train and car journeys, all the excess of a bygone era. The sequences in which the memoirs of Feuillade’s leading actress Musidora are illustrated are even more beautiful: here the actors of the remake slip into the roles of the actors of the original, and the story finally becomes a hall of mirrors.
The serial marvel of Irma Vep is that Assayas balances this complicated homage and the candy-colored hype he unleashes around it for eight episodes. Sometimes the two spheres even overlap, for example when Eidinger’s Gottfried, who is in the hospital after a failed sex game, flees out the window in classic slapstick fashion. It’s only in the final episodes that the balance begins to crumble, and that has to do with a film trick invented in France but perfected in Hollywood. Because Mira, for whom the catsuit that is part of her role becomes her second skin, can now walk through walls and haunt her former lovers in their hotel rooms. You marvel at the effect for a moment, then you realize it destroys the delicate beauty of a fiction where digital magic has no place.
The industry has taken over the cinema, Gottfried exclaims at the closing party after his last day of shooting, everything now belongs to the platforms and corporations. That may be, but “Irma Vep” demonstrates how to use the leeway that still exists in this system. Streaming services and pay channels will change the texture of storytelling in images. But the cinema always shines through.
Irma Vep airs this Friday at 8:15 p.m. on Sky Atlantic.