There are certain tropes that come with every form of media. When asked to create personal art, a writer will tell a story of a writer, a painter will draw himself at a canvas, and a filmmaker will question his relationship with a camera. That’s how things have gone for centuries, capturing attempts to understand the creator on levels that the common man cannot. However, the closer to the epicenter that you get, the less interesting it gets when you realize that every writer tells those stories, every painter draws those pictures, and every filmmaker will claim to be subversive as they capture their craft in ways that just about everyone does. It’s not that they’re bad, but the level of personal takes are often less diverse than one would think.
It’s what makes approaching Olivier Assayas particularly an odd beast. I first discovered him with The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), which focused on the careers of three actresses in a compelling moment in their lives. Trust me, it’s way more interesting than that sounds, finding a profound subtext in aging and beauty as well as various personal struggles that inform the story. Assayas is a gifted storyteller who I’ve only grown to love the more that I discovered from him, especially with the phenomenal, decade-best Personal Shopper (2016).
Which makes Irma Vep (1996) a wonderful surprise. On the surface, you’d have to think that a filmmaker creating a story about how making intellectual movies is boring to be hacky, he manages to find ways to use a cross-section of culture in the Mid-90s to comment on the changing nature of French cinema and why it should be more like Arnold Schwarzenegger. There’s even one character, donned in a shirt for The Terminator (1984) who subtly makes the argument that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the modern auteur. The adrenaline-fueled, shoot ‘em up body builder definitely remains a unique phenomenon in film history, but the viewer has to ask themselves if Cahiers du Cinema would really humor him as the modern Howard Hawks.
But what is Irma Vep? That feels as prescient coming out of the film as it is picking it from the incredible quality found on The Criterion Channel. The truth is that it’s a miracle of a film, existing as a cosmic force of ideas that manage to collide at every turn and yet the tone never breaks. It’s consistently fluid, capable of drawing the viewer into this story that feels more ambitious and complex than even it lets on. This behind the scenes story covers all of your bases: film theory, silent film, ninjas, lesbian drama, and even a jewel heist. The final image where the final print of Irma Vep is scratched up, like an indie punk music video feels symbolic of something greater in the psychology of filmmaking.
What is Assayas going for? To general audiences, it’s something that will always be frustrating. In a lot of ways it reminds me of The Watermelon Woman (1997), which used film history to find a greater personal identity. It’s the phantasmagorical child of Francois Truffaut, managing to be present both in the moment while constantly pulling out the film critic. Maggie Cheung is the only actor here who plays herself, occasionally even breaking into interview segments where you can’t understand if this is meant to be read as fiction or real commentary. Everything about this film is unexpected, and it does so with one of the most confident, rambunctious takes imaginable.
Irma Vep, at least in the context of the film, is a remake of Les Vampires (1915), an old French short. Until I looked it up, I was convinced that it was fiction, something created to give texture to this story. Instead it’s real, playing throughout the film as a reference point. The actors reenact the sequence, the camera cutting to a stylized black-and-white, capturing the story of a vampire who controls the underworld. But, as producers begin to enter the fray, it’s clear that there are a lot of problems. For one, why even cast Cheung when the central character has always read, even in comics, as French?
Enter René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), the director who is in charge of getting this film in on time. He’s suffering a mental breakdown and nobody is entirely sure what his vision is. He almost exists solely off-set, constantly looking at prints and trying to make sense of a vision that he’s long lost passion for. Whether or not it was intentional, the casting of Léaud is one of the biggest strokes of genius, casting an actor known for playing film lover Antoine Doinel as someone who is losing his sanity. In some ways, it works as this deconstruction of his character, going through the midlife crisis that Truffaut could never direct (R.I.P.).
I’m sure there’s other stunt casting in this that would make me admire this warped world all the more, but I love that almost everyone in this film has some divide from each other. Vidal never quite feels connected to his picture. Cheung has to rely on translators to understand just what’s going on. Zoe (Nathalie Richard) is a costume designer who never quite gets her love replenished by Cheung despite countless cute and innocent exchanges. So much of the film is about the push and pull, the compromise of production.
One of the most enjoyable details of this film is the choice to model Irma Vep’s costume around Michelle Pfeiffer from Batman Returns (1992), covered in black form-fitting latex. Zoe complains about the Batman films, claiming that they’re not a great trilogy. However, by the end of the 90s the series would get one more film… with Schwarzenegger. Whether or not it is intentional, it definitely works as further commentary on the divide between art and entertainment, the need to create something deeper. In a time where comic book movies were less rampant, it feels like a quaint commentary and one that would be on the nose in 2020. Instead, it’s this nice touch about how a cross-section of culture is all striving for attention, but only realizing that so much can be consumed. As Cheung reveals, certain films don’t make it to Asia. There’s once again a divide between cultures on even this level.
I don’t know enough about Assayas as a person to understand if any of this is personal or just a very successful experiment. What is clear is that where filmmakers like Federico Fellini would comment on the filmmaking process in more direct ways with 8 ½ (1960), Assayas was doing more indirectly, at times doing Jean-Luc Godard’s experimentation better than the New Wave icon. You can argue that he even makes a more successful collage of cinema’s style and influence better than Quentin Tarantino ever did. He would be too direct, never letting the story be distracted from a righteous dialogue passage. Assayas meanwhile is confident enough to just let the film grain change, the score to swell up and present something more provocative and mysterious.
At least, I hope Irma Vep is an impersonal story. If you see Vidal as his stand-in, it becomes something more concerning. Was this created as some attempt to overcome writer’s block? There’s plenty to suggest that the muse is no longer doing anything for him, and his inability to craft a cohesive vision suggests someone whose career is on the decline. He’s borrowing from hacky American films and watching bad Asian action movies. He doesn’t even understand who Irma Vep as a character is. Why did he cast Cheung? Again, it’s never outright said, but Vidal’s absence manages to be the greatest shadow over the story, reflecting a production barely holding on.
That’s what makes this a fascinating film. Even if it is designed to end with a frustrating piece of abstraction, it does so as a commentary on an artist who has lost their will. They have given up making the best quality and have practically drawn on the most absurd, offensive artwork possible over every image. What does it mean? In a literal sense, it means that the production that we’ve been watching is of total irrelevance. There is no reason to believe that this film will be any good. If anything, it predicted the degradation of remake culture by showing how crass the misunderstanding can get. The worst part is that everyone else has good intentions, but Vidal has lost any sense of filmmaking. As a Doinel symbol, it feels richer, reflecting how French cinema lacks an important identity, relying on the past and other cultures for any value. Nothing about Irma Vep is designed to be authentic, and it’s crushing.
To be honest, it’s rare that an outright disaster has been allowed to be filmed with such sympathy, a belief that this shoot has much more substance than the audience at home will ever see. I think of American counterpoints for these, like The Producers (1967) or Hollywood Ending (2002), and both treat failure more as a shameless farce. There is no doubt that we’re supposed to mock these people for creating art that is incoherent garbage. America has too much of an insecurity to find the nuance in failure. Birdman (2014) can’t end with Michael Keaton shooting himself in misery. It has to end with his suicide attempt being considered high art as he gets a bird nose.
This isn’t to suggest that these stories lack a humility, but I think that Assayas is observant enough to understand that there’s tragedy in art. The decisions of one person can impact the grander vision. Vidal has little to do with the bigger picture, and yet his paranoid editing results in an utter mess. After almost two hours of growing to love these characters and understanding why they got into the industry, to see this scratched and bastardized vision is soul-crushing. All of those hours have become a waste despite everyone putting their heart into making a story that they felt mattered.
It’s a story at constant odds with each other. I think nowhere is it clearer than the idea of whether Irma Vep should be considered art. After all, it’s a film that features a conversation about how French cinema is dull because it appeals to intellectuals and not general audiences. The conversation itself is designed for intellectuals who indulge in French New Wave, which remains one of the most exciting eras for the country’s cinema. But is it worth it? This is about making an action movie, but clearly is trying to understand why we watch those films in the first place. It’s an identity crisis because every character wants to make great art, to have names on their resume that will land them potential gigs with Ridley Scott. Instead, they will be seen as failures because the man in charge didn’t know what he was doing.
The American counterpoints fail to capture this. Even if they are the experts who do this regularly, it feels like they’re proud to admit that a box office bomb impacts so many jobs. There are people out there who tried and will never get the recognition they deserve because they ended up working on Irma Vep. In a modern sense, it’s the nightmare of working with Tom Hooper on Cats (2019), which had rushed effects and similarly had Hooper tirelessly do a final cut the night before the premiere. We don’t get the stories of people who tried to make it more substantial, only to watch it become the most ridiculed film, even by the actors at The Oscars.
Irma Vep is an incredible achievement even if most of its greatest moments feel like accidents. This is a story of filmmaking that realizes the power of every role, revealing that everyone may be invested in telling a good story, but one cog in the machine could upset the whole operation. I can’t even count the failed productions that happened since 1996. Even, ironically, that Schwarzenegger film Batman & Robin (1997) is a very public symbol of what this film is talking about. All we can do is appreciate the history of art, hoping to place our stamp on it in any significant way. Not everyone will, but every now and then you’ll get there. You just have to take the risk.
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