The contemporary filmmaker is a tragic figure. René has at least half a dozen problems. He wants to remake a silent film series he adores and threatens to collapse under the weight; he hired a great theater mime (Lars Eidinger) with a crack problem; its star Mira (Alicia Vikander) doesn’t understand that a hundred years ago people wrote things in notebooks; the budget is too small for a costume drama, and between shoots he has to explain the difference between a series and a long film with a doctor because no one wants to insure him.
Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria”, “Carlos”) wrote and directed “Irma Vep” and he certainly projected a lot of himself into René. He is familiar with how great visions wear themselves out with feasibility, with films becoming series, and with films about people who make films, the tensions behind the camera, where you never quite know whether they are erotic or just Rivalry.
Irma Vep is an anagram for “vampire”, the character is more than a hundred years old
He shot “Irma Vep” as a film in a similar way, in 1996 “Irma Vep” was released in the cinema with his then wife Maggie Cheung in the leading role – everything revolved around Stard, Maggie Cheung played Maggie Cheung, who is hired, to star in a remake of the series, which a veteran of the Nouvelle Vague (Jean-Pierre Léaud) fails to do. The new series is an update, a recurring lesson on the fine line between storytelling and industry. The new Irma is about the cinema, which is secretly trying to continue on television. So Assayas, who is one of the greatest living French filmmakers, shoots a series with the same care, imagery, fervor that he would put into any other film.
Irma Vep is an anagram for “vampire”, the character comes from a series that is more than a hundred years old – in ten episodes of different lengths, Louis Feuillade let 1915 Les Vampires set off for Paris, where they rob and murder, always on their heels a journalist whose great love they have killed. Irma, the vampire in the black catsuit, works as a dancer in a nightclub – “Hypnotic Eyes” is the name of one of the episodes, huge and framed in black, they looked down from the screen, because Les Vampires was a series for the cinema because there was nothing else at the time. At the center, as Irma, was the French silent film star Musidora alias Jeanne Roques, a close friend of Colette who wrote, directed and produced.
With the budget out of control, and behind the scenes there’s either flirting or hating: Mira (Alicia Vikander) and costume designer Zoe (Jeanne Balibar).
(Photo: carole bethuel/Warner Media)
Mira dreamed of the role, you can understand that immediately when she tries on the catsuit in the first episode. Alicia Vikander plays her as an arrogant woman who only lets her ex-lover put her in her place, also out of a desire for revenge. Mira has just arrived in Paris from LA, doesn’t understand a word of what the others are saying in production and it doesn’t interest her either. But when she tries on the catsuit, she immediately turns into Irma Vep: she sneaks away, scurries around the rooms, steals something from a purse, hides behind doors.
It’s wonderful to watch, it’s maybe a bit more fun if you know the old Feuillade films – but that’s not necessary, Assayas has sprinkled small snippets into his series, and sometimes he lets the old scenes merge into the newly shot ones , with an infectious pleasure in the intoxication of the pictures.
Eight episodes, on Sky.
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