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Paul McAdory on Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep miniseries, a less cynical Hollywood remake.
Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep—the new miniseries-reimagining of the director’s 1996 film Irma Vep, which itself depicts the troubled attempts of an aging, neurotic French filmmaker to remake Louis Feuillade’s 1915-16 silent film serial Les Vampires—is, like so much other television, a retread. Yet unlike other shows, it doesn’t retrace its steps in a panicked search for money. It seeks something rarer and more precious.
In the 2022 edition, Alicia Vikander portrays an American megastar named Mira who is playing the thief, murderer, and general villainess Irma Vep, a lead agent of a criminal troupe known as the Vampires. Maggie Cheung played herself playing Irma in 1996, while the mononymous Musidora originated Irma’s role in 1915-16. The show’s subject is cinematic art: how to make it, why to make it, whether it can now be made, and if so, whether making it matters. The show-within-the-show’s cast and crew winkingly debate these questions. They argue over whether an eight-episode miniseries might actually be an eight-hour movie. A German actor named Gottfried, an edgelord pansexual rockstar type who vomits charisma, asks at the start of a goodbye speech, “Why are we making movies now?”
“We live in boring, dark, dull times,” he says. “Where is the sense of adventure?” Between lines he smashes a bottle, breaks a chair, sways his way onto tabletops. He is what he perpetually has: a hangover whose massive strength points shakily but assuredly to the supposed glory and fun of yesterday despite its sickening results.
His questions and assertions (as well as his very character) probably sound familiar, perhaps tired. I have heard them; I have said them. Many have. But the sense that one is watching what one has seen before, and hearing characters speak lines one has heard or read before, does not here register as a symptom of writerly laziness or evacuated inspiration.
This is a remake about remaking a remake. Any originality it manages derives from its baroque, committed unoriginality. It does not invite comparisons with its predecessors but straightforwardly makes them: Cheung, prowling across rain-slicked rooftops in a latex catsuit, is superimposed on Vikander, shimmying down the side of a ritzy hotel in a tight silk number; a wedding party commences in the silent black-and-white of 1916 before cutting to the gloomy, too-blue palette of the Les Vampires remake being shot within the Irma Vep remake.
Self-conscious repetition is the rule here, as it is in contemporary cultural production generally. Remakes, sequels, prequels, spinoffs, expanded universes, reimaginings stuffed with Easter eggs and recaps that collect them: We have many names for dreck and many people who profess to love or at least like it. Their love, as evidenced in tweets, blurbs, reviews, etc., is its own unending echo of visceral, eloquent feeling, as are the hatred, discontent, and resignation voiced by detractors and the snobbish condescension of above-it-all observers.
Irma Vep, a languid, waxen copy of its predecessor, comes to life because it exploits another of repetition’s uses: incantation. Characters speak of cinema’s “black magic,” its power to summon transcendent forces. So the series chants. It seeks to open a portal, to call down or up a spirit, to become possessed and possess its audience. That the series filmed over the course of Irma Vep, The Vampires, looks like shit, is both a good joke and an acknowledgment that the spirit does not always come. — Paul McAdory
The Dirt: Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions.
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