Title: Irma Vep
This is a saga that spans over 100 years.
Way back in 1915, Louis Feuillade wrote and directed a silent film. It was called Les Vampires. No, it was not a film about Dracula. The Vampires are a criminal gang led by a man known as the Grand Vampire. Irma Vep (an anagram for Vampire) is a night club performer, member of The Vampires, and a general femme fatale. Irma Vep spends much of her time in a tight fitting black suit that is the inspiration for every cat woman suit ever made. Phillipe is a journalist working to expose The Vampires. Moreno is a hypnotist that is after The Vampires money and falls in love with Irma Vep. The film is the battle between Moreno and The Vampires and Phillipe’s attempts to bring them all to justice.
Here’s the thing. Feuillade apparently couldn’t tell this story in the time normally allotted to a conventional motion picture. In fact, the film is nearly 400 minutes long. Realizing that people probably wouldn’t sit through a 6 1/2 hour film in one sitting, he broke it up into 10 parts of varying lengths. In all honesty, I did not actually watch all 400 minutes. In the year 2022, that’s a pretty big ask to watch that long of a silent film. I watched approximately a quarter of it. It allowed me get a good feel for the film.
Despite this being during World War I and despite some episodes being banned for violence and immorality, it became a huge hit in France. Years later, it has attained a high spot in critical regard, considered the forerunner of the crime drama genre and developing techniques that were later used by such directors as Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock.
Fast forward to 1996. A French director named Oliver Assayas writes and directs the film Irma Vep. It won’t be clear from the plot description, but the film is a comedy poking fun at French cinema.
In this film, a director named Rene Vidal is remaking Les Vampires. Controversially, Vidal has hired an Asian actor, Maggie Cheung, to play Irma Vep. The film Irma Vep is about the making of this film.
Rene Vidal is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud. Maggie Cheung plays, um, a Hong Kong actress named Maggie Cheung. Maggie, whenever she puts on the Irma Vep suit, appears to take on the spirit of the silent film Irma Vep. She creeps around at night in hallways and roof tops. She sneaks into rooms and steals jewelry.
After a day of filming, Vidal considers the result horrible and storms off. He has a nervous breakdown. He’s replaced by another French director, who immediately decides that he wants to fire Maggie and hire a French actor. Zoe, a costume designer, makes a pass at Maggie and is refused. Maggie leaves the set to meet Ridley Scott to talk about working on a big budget film. Eventually Vidal’s version of the film is found and shown. It’s a completely nonlinear hallucinatory film with scratches and splices. At the conclusion, it’s not clear if this is the film that will be released or will be replaced with whatever the new director comes up with.
OK, back in the real world. Oliver Assayas and Maggie Cheung fell in love and got married. Maggie moved to France and became a successful actor in European films. They later got divorced and Maggie retired from acting. She’s been little seen since.
In 2020, nearly twenty-five years after he completed Irma Vep, apparently Assayas decided that he wasn’t finished with Irma Vep. Somehow he sold HBO on an eight part series called Irma Vep that he would write and direct. I can barely imagine the pitch meeting: “You see, I’m a French director obsessed with a 400 minute silent film that made a French language comedy based upon it 25 years ago and now I want you to give me a ton of money so that I can make a series in English that expands that universe even further.”
Whatever. However it happened, I’m glad that it did. If the Irma Vep film wasn’t meta enough, this takes it into a whole different level. The director starring in this series is still Rene Vidal. In this universe, the film Irma Vep was made. The actor playing Vidal is Vincent Macaigne. Interestingly enough, he seems to be about the same age as the Vidal actor in the 1996 film. Such anomalies are embraced in this series. This Vidal is at times gentle, sweet, and almost cringing while at other times is almost homicidal in his rage.
The actress playing Irma Vep is named Mira Harberg (played by Alicia Vikander). Mira is trying to make a pivot and start acting in more serious productions. She sees this series as that springboard.
Since the series is so much longer than the film, much more detail is added to the series. The actors for Phillipe and Moreno are much richer in detail. The actor playing Phillipe is a prima donna full of self doubt. The actor playing Moreno pretty much steals the show. He’s a German actor that is a force larger than life. He can only act when he’s on crack cocaine, forcing members of the crew to find crack dealers. At one point, he autoerotic asphyxiates himself into unconsciousness. Expected to remain in a coma, he comes to, escapes from the hospital, and shows up on set eager to act.
If all of this isn’t complex enough, there’s a whole different thread running through the series about Feuillade and the making of the original Les Vampires. The same actors play roles in this thread. For example, the actor playing Vidal is also playing Feuillade. The same actor plays Irma Dep in both films.
It’s actually even more complex than that. In the series they sometimes show the original scenes from Les Vampires and sometimes show the same scenes but played by the actors in the series.
So, for example, Alicia Vikander plays an actress named Mira Harberg, she plays Mira Harberg acting as Irma Vep, she plays Musidora, the original actor that played Irma Vep in 1915, and she plays Musidora playing Irma Vep.
Got that? Keeping all of that straight must have been an unimaginable difficult acting task.
There’s all kinds of callbacks to the Irma Vep film in the series. Vidal has a breakdown and leaves the film (although he does come back to finish). Zoe again makes a pass at the Irma Vep actor but is again rebuffed. At the completion of the film, much like Maggie, Mira leaves for a much larger, much more high profile film role. When Mira puts on the costume, she also seems to be taken over by the spirit of Irma Vep. She sneaks around and steals jewelry. In the costume, she seems to have the ability to move through solid walls. Vidal has an Asian ex-wife named Jade. In this world, Jade was the star of the Irma Vep film. Serving as a proxy for Maggie Cheung, she appears here in the form of a guiding spirit for Vidal.
As with the film, much of the humor of the series derives from the basic absurdity of the film making business.
How do these all compare? Les Vampires is interesting from a historical point of view. The film Irma Vep is a great look at 1990s independent French film making. And the series does a great job lampooning the state of the industry now. It was a pretty serious time commitment but I found all three to be interesting and entertaining.
I can hardly wait to see how Assayas will approach Irma Vep in the year 2050.
dorkenstein 