The lady is a vamp
An enthralling and seductive homage to cinema’s golden age – with the bittersweet twist of a crime thriller
Vampires, it would seem, refuse to die. But here’s a take on the legend that has nothing to do with Dracula and his toothy friends. In fact, it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before: a visually stunning series that follows A-list actress Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander, above) as she strives to satisfy her more artistic yearnings.
She’s drawn to Paris, where acclaimed art-house director René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne) is helming a mini-series remake of the classic French silent cinema serial Les Vampires, and has cast Mira as a villainess who was first played on screen a century ago.
As she dons the sheer black catsuit of her character, Irma Vep, (an anagram of vampire), Mira taps into the seductive power of her imagination and draws deep from the magical history of movie-making, but outside the artistry, the set on which she’s making the show turns out to be frenetically troubled and chaotic.
Mira is disturbed after the end of an affair with a girlfriend who now has a wealthy husband, and her director is mentally unstable and trailing an air of notoriety after trying to run over an actor on one of his previous films.
Plus, the other stars are constantly asking for their ‘motivation’, and the producer seems to be on the verge of pulling the financial plug.
Yet with the cast and crew determined to make their labour of love, Mira is carried along on an increasingly unpredictable artistic and personal odyssey…
A bittersweet love letter to the art of making movies, this dazzling show from the HBO network is unlike anything else that’s been on the small screen, even in this golden age of TV.
French director Olivier Assayas has created an extended new version of his 1996 film Irma Vep to explore the wonder of cinema, the way that it has changed since the silent age and the downright peculiar ways in which movies relate to the real world.
The script shimmers with subtlety and wit, the visuals and costumes are sultry and stylish, and though there’s no denying the multi-layered intellectual heft of the series, the sheer entertainment value and sense of surprise will keep hold of your attention over its eight episodes.
The luminous Vikander (who played the eerily chilling android of Ex Machina) takes command of the role for which Maggie Cheung was acclaimed in the 1996 film. But look out, too, for the fashion model Devon Ross (inset, above) and a cameo appearance by Kristen Stewart, the one-time star of the Twilight franchise, who found a fresh artistic lease of life in Assayas’s Personal Shopper.
Now, just where did he find inspiration for Mira’s yearnings for a new, high-profile chapter to her career?