Irma Vep Encore: Olivier Assayas Circles Back to Dig Deeper

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A-

French director Olivier Assayas is one of who those artists you can follow through his cinematic life. There are his films of youth and age, experiments in literary adaptations, B-movies, and films about film.

He doesn’t exactly repeat himself, but he digs up old ground with his new HBO series, Irma Vep, the first episode of which was released last Monday. The series takes its title and general plot from his 1996 film of the same title, a wryly satiric portrait of independent filmmaking that was like a punk generation version to 8-1/2 or Day for Night.

The film starred New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as a burned-out French director who wants to do a remake of the 1915-1916 silent-era serial, Les Vampires, who are not actually vampires but gang of jewel thieves, led by the slinky cat burglar, Irma Vep, an anagram for “vampire.” The film starred Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung, who, in real life, Assayas subsequently married.

The new Irma Vep stars Swedish actor Alicia Vikander (Ex-Machina, The Danish Girl) as an American, Mira (anagram for Irma), disillusioned with her work in blockbuster comic book movies and a recent romantic breakup.

She arrives in Paris, accompanied by her chic film-nerd assistant, Regina (model Devon Ross) to meet the neurotic French director, René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne). In this version, the director is clearly a kind of stand-in for Assayas himself, the filmmaker who made a film called Irma Vep years ago, with a Chinese actress named Jade Lee, and is now trying to make an eight-part series with the same title.

Mira sees it as a chance to embody a powerful woman character and has done her research on the original charismatic Irma Vep, the actress, Misadora, the actress, and pioneering French woman filmmaker. René is more interested in her as a physical presence.

The femme fatale movie “vamp” he tells her comes from “vampire” (technically, though the source was Theda Bara’s 1915 feature, A Fool There Was). The opening conversation with Mira isn’t promising: “I don’t care about movies,” he tells her. “I used to, but not anymore. Maybe it will come back.”

Mira tells her agent she is feeling destabilized. Something strange happens when Mira dons the black body suit. Almost immediately, Mira floats up a spiral staircase in a scene reminiscent of an exhilarating moment in Assayas’ 1996 film with Cheung.

To be honest though, Irma Vep initially feels a bit flat-footed, stuffed with character introductions and clusters of exposition and inside showbiz references that feel a bit trite. There have been so many arch, behind-the-scenes series — the French series Call My Agent and it’s British copy, Ten Percent, HBO’s Barry and Curb Your Enthusiasm — that we almost know the types by heart: The self-indulgent director, the petty rivalries between actors, romantic hurt feelings, the de rigueur references to recent scandals (ie. Harvey Weinstein).

There are the characters with substance abuse problems, the nerdish discussions of zombie movies as consumer metaphor, the calls from the avaricious agent (Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein), the film crew members who are dictators of their tiny realms (Jeanne Balibar as the costume designer), and the financier whose real goal is to sign the star up to a cosmetics contract.

There are two uncompelling relationship subplots: Mira discovers that her ex-lover and assistant, Laurie (Adria Arjona) is in town with her new successful director husband and flaunting her new status. In a parallel break-up scenario, post-#MeToo, the leading man Edmond (Vincent Lacoste) is insisting on a sex scene with his ex, Severine (Sigrid Bouaziz), despite his in-real-life restraining order.

I’ve seen four of the eight episodes in the series, enough to know that what’s apparently going on here is not really what’s going on. Assayas takes something familiar to defamiliarize through constant, fluid transformations.

The dysfunctional movie set satire is good enough, but more interesting is the way Assayas moves us through different layers of experience. On the outer layer, there’s the mixture of tension and boredom in the community of the film set, but we also fold into drab low-budget period movie they are shooting.

Behind that, there are the clips from black-and-white Les Vampires, a film admired by Luis Bunuel that suggests that normality is a state achieved by tuning out the power of sex and terror of death, that criminals and artists share a common impulse. My hope for the series is that it starts to get much stranger.

Irma Vep. Directed by Olivier Assayas. Starring Alicia Vikander, Vincent Macaigne, Jeanne Balibar, Devon Ross, Vincent Lacoste, Nora Hamzawi, Adria Arjona, Carrie Brownstein, Tom Sturridge. Available on HBO Mondays at 9 pm.