TV Review – Irma Vep

Irma Vep (HBO)
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas

I can’t say I have ever been enamored with the work of Olivier Assayas. I’ve seen several of his films: Irma Vep, Summer Hours, and Personal Shopper. They are not bad films by any means, but I never fell in love with his work like I have with other directors. Having just recently watched and reviewed the original Irma Vep, I decided to check out his 2022 television adaptation of the film, wondering why he would choose to revisit this and what the project would add to the original movie. Once again, I walked away, unsure how to feel. I was not unimpressed but certainly not head over heels.

Mira (Alicia Vikander) is an American movie star dealing with a career making shallow blockbusters and a recent breakup with a longtime partner. She’s come to France to star as the lead in a TV remake of a famous French silent film serial, Les Vampires. The production is troubled with Rene Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), the director, struggling with a host of anxiety disorders, his own lack of vision for the project, and increasing hostility with the cast and crew. As the series progresses, what started as a reasonably grounded look behind the scenes of a TV production becomes a surreal metacommentary on filmmaking & how art can be a means to preserve or recreate a relationship that has ended.

I have followed a couple TikTok accounts over the years that talk in-depth about the acting process. Such things have been the focus of jokes for a long while, and it is undoubtedly true that actors can take themselves far too seriously. However, a certain angle on the profession has caused me to see that when an actor reaches a particular place of authenticity, they take on a shaman-like quality. It’s uncommon, but it transcends just a movie or TV show when you see such a performance. A great actor who can give such a profound performance has to abandon their Self and place another identity in that spot. It makes sense how some actors have psychological or emotional issues because, if they are taking their job seriously, they can damage these parts of themselves.

Irma Vep posits that the director is like a spiritual medium who sets the table, guiding the participants to where the spirit can leave the body. The deeper we go into this, the more fragmented the show we watch becomes. Throughout the series, we have the narrative of making the show, selected scenes from the original silent film, scenes from the new TV adaptation, flashbacks to behind the scenes of the original silent film with the contemporary actors playing their counterparts in the past, brief clips of Assayas’ 1996 Irma Vep, and then Mira and the character becoming a sort of mix of each other and able to move through space without being held back by distance or time.

As we get deeper into the neuroses of Rene Vidal, more of Assayas’ personal life starts to emerge. Vidal apparently made an Irma Vep film in the 1990s and married the lead actress, Jade Lee. Assayas married Maggie Cheung, the star of the actual Irma Vep film. They divorced three years later, and Cheung has since retired from acting. In this series, Jade Lee has gone through a similar personal journey and only appears as Vidal’s memory of her, trying to gently convince him to move on with his life already. So, is this Irma Vep series about Assayas’ own issues processing his divorce? Kind of, but not entirely. That’s just a piece of the larger tapestry.

There’s also a more extensive conversation about the moviemaking ecosystem in our time. Assayas isn’t so gauche as to have characters complain about “kids & their phones.” The film accepts that the advance of technology is just what happens. Instead, the big questions are about how we continue to tell stories that captivate people. Actors feel disconnected from their roles because they can’t feel the reality. Interpersonal conflict bleeds over into shooting, leading to things like Vidal killing off an actor’s character so that he can kick him off the set.

Eventually, the series we are watching becomes further disconnected from the reality it began in. It’s hard to tell from whose perspective we see things in the last episode. Mira as Vep walks through walls and eavesdrops on conversations. People can see her, so it deflates the idea this is just her dream. Or is it that she just can’t escape the dream world anymore? Or are these Vidal’s fantasies, who admittedly fetishizes the character. Irma Vep climbs out of the screen in his home/editing studio briefly before returning to the picture.

At its core, this is a project about reflection, that cinema can only move forward if it remains introspective enough to look back at its origins and understand the influences that transformed it along the way. Where I found Damien Chazelle’s Babylon to be a loud, obnoxious declaration on the “death of cinema,” I will admit that Assayas has delivered something far more nuanced & thoughtful. 

COVID-19 has forever changed the relationship of the audience and cinema. I don’t imagine I will ever go to the movie theater as often as I once did. The way I engage with a film has shrunk to my laptop screen. Do I lose something in that? Most certainly, but that’s simply what I have chosen going forward. There will come a day when filmmaking is no longer sustainable, particularly as the threat of climate collapse grows by the day. Storytelling won’t die; the humans who make it through will continue to weave narratives to communicate these unwieldy ideas and ruminations.