Irma Vep

So she decided to go to France to play Irma Vep in a remake of a 1916 silent soap opera directed by Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires. How was it? Olivier Assayas ...

A fusion of the heroine that seems to touch one of the other characters in the series in an even more intriguing and moving meta switch: Vincent Macaigne, director of the series in the series, finally seems to be the incarnation of Assayas himself. He also cleverly plays with this mise en abyme by using different formats, juggling between that of the series we are watching, the series that the characters are filming and the original Feuillade soap opera (with sublime restored sequences) to better to merge the dimensions. A key element, especially in a series that largely tells the very production of a series, with which Olivier Assayas plays admirably in his staging thanks to a skilful management of spaces.

Rewatching the original 'Irma Vep' will give you a few clues to Olivier Assayas' HBO remake.

Just as "Irma Vep" is an anagram of "vampire," "Mira" is an anagram of "Irma," and the more the barrier between her and her character starts to dissolve, the harder it is to tell which is which. In the HBO version, Vikander's Irma wears one made of black velvet, which fits her lithe softness: Her Irma Vep is like an animal, fuzzy and dangerous. The film is about a production of a remake of a classic, after all. Given all of this, it's hilarious that Assayas himself is "remaking" his film, this time as an HBO series starring Alicia Vikander in the Maggie Cheung role and set in the modern day. (It's available on HBO Max and The Criterion Channel.) Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung plays a version of herself who has been cast in a remake of Les Vampires, a famous French silent serial from 1915-16 about a group of violent criminals, one of whom is the mesmerizing catsuit-clad villainess Irma Vep. As director René Vidal (played by French cinema legend Jean-Pierre Léaud) succumbs to his anxiety, the separation between Maggie and the character she's supposed to play starts to blur. Throughout it all, the carousel dance of a film set pokes and prods at our main characters, shuttling them to psychiatrists' offices and Parisian apartment buildings and raves on the backs of motor scooters.

Olivier Assayas revisits one of his earliest triumphs with this HBO miniseries version of Irma Vep starring Tomb Raider star Alicia Vikander.

So much of the original Irma Vep’s bewitching alchemy could be chalked up to Cheung’s casual radiance, and to how Assayas let his fascination with it determine the zigzagging course of the loose plot. Through this element, Assayas asks himself whether it was even right to return to a project that belonged, in spirit, to both of them. It’s probably wise that Assayas hasn’t tried to replicate that exact vibe without his one-time muse, and across a much longer stretch of story. One of the most memorable scenes in the original Irma Vep found Cheung pushing back against a journalist insisting that no one was interested any more in small French art dramas, if they ever had been. On the small screen, as on the large one, Irma Vep works best as an inspired chaos-on-the-set comedy, with lots of deliciously bitter personalities volleying off each other. He also cuts frequently to scenes from the original Les Vampires and to Vidal’s restaging of the same, as though he were smuggling his own stealth remake of the silent serial into the margins of the show. The production scenes trend toward inspired farce, fueled by running gags like the fact that nobody on the call sheet seems to have read the entire script as opposed to just their own lines. Early into the third episode of this relentlessly meta and self-devouring showbiz drama, a group of actors lounge around a backyard table at a Parisian house party, talking about the state of the entertainment industry and the value of the kind of project they’re appearing in — which is to say, the miniseries we’re watching and the one they’re making within the miniseries we’re watching. Of late, his films have the habit of devolving into intellectual bull sessions where the characters unpack the themes aloud. And so Vidal casts Hollywood actress Mira in the role of slinky cat burglar Irma Vep. Mira, in turn, is played by Hollywood actress Alicia Vikander, filling the skin-tight rubber outfit once worn by the now-retired Maggie Cheung and, nearly a century earlier, the silent-era French star Musidora. Strip off one layer of source material and there’s always another underneath. Still, did we need so much of this subpar remake within the remake? Mira, who’s just come off the promotional tour surrounding a new superhero blockbuster called Doomsday, wants a change of pace.