Director once again skewers Hollywood
HBO series updates film on heartbreak of moviemaking for streaming era
The new HBO limited series “Irma Vep” asks whether auteur cinema can adapt to, or even survive, the streaming video age. While the scenario for its eight episodes — the first of which premieres Monday — leans toward skepticism, the show itself represents a resounding “Yes!”
Written and directed by Olivier Assayas, riffing off his 1996 movie of the same name and incorporating more of the renowned French filmmaker’s personal story, “Irma Vep” is a delightfully self-reflexive ode to the heartbreak of making and loving movies — or streaming television in the 2020s.
Assayas’ acclaimed movie version, which starred his then-soon-to-be wife, Maggie Cheung, detailed the trials of indie filmmaking in the 1990s. They later divorced and Cheung retired from acting, the industry mutated in the past 25 years, and the series fictionalizes the fallout.
Formally playful, the new “Irma Vep” is packed with droll and dire insights into financing, compromising and managing the madness of creativity in the face of almighty algorithms.
This time it’s Alicia Vikander donning the title villainess’ black catsuit, which was first iconically worn by Musidora in Louis Feuillade’s 1915 crime serial “Les Vampires” (Irma Vep is an anagram of “vampire”). She’s Mira Harberg, a Hollywood star of lucrative disaster movies and, compared with most everyone else in the sprawling cast, down-to-earth except in matters of the heart.
Mira has fled to Paris to help neurotic, declining directing genius René Vidal (a splendidly misanthropic Vincent Macaigne, who was great in Assayas’ 2018 “Non-Fiction”) remake the century-old thriller for contemporary consumers.
When Mira practices Musidora moves in her silk velvet catsuit, ballet-trained Vikander’s physical acting can be transporting. She also looks great in the half-dozen other fetish costumes and many clever, casual outfits designed by Jurgen Doering.
But Vikander wears Mira’s guarded yearning best of all. The character doesn’t just juggle lovers past, perhaps present and probably future, as well as her several collaborators on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Mira also struggles to locate, then maintain, her artistic integrity in a milieu rife with diversions and distractions.
“This is exactly what people want right now,” her Los Angeles agent Zelda (“Portlandia’s” Carrie Brownstein) insists regarding an offer from Marvel to play the Silver Surfer in a reboot Mira wants no part of. “High-concept, feminist, lady-led superhero movie!”
“Tomb Raider” headliner Vikander has never found a more appealing, revealing and in every way natural fit than Irma/Mira.
Beside Macaigne, some standouts within the show’s perfectly tuned ensemble include Lars Eidinger of “Babylon Berlin” as a wild German actor who can’t perform without crack cocaine, and Adria Arjona and supermodel Devon Ross as Mira’s personal assistants who, in their different ways, can be more like the boss of her.
A film buff’s delight, “Irma Vep” boasts beautifully restored footage from 1915, often juxtaposed against René’s modern re-creations of the scenes, processed with a cool blue tint. The contemporary shoot’s endless politics and screwups pay off in grandly composed “making of”
sequences, which impossibly go from interior to exterior in what seem like single, breathtaking setups. It’s movie magic in daily grind disguise.
“Irma Vep” comes off like a more cine-literate and serious-minded “Call My Agent” — which may not make the show an algorithm winner, but it’s no less brilliant for it. Assayas, who pioneered the modern limited series with 2010’s masterful “Carlos,” seems perfectly aware of — and committed to — the risks he’s taking here.
In an exchange that devastates both the artist and an industry that only recognizes the “product” part of production, a cosmetics mogul who’s bankrolling the shoot tells René he’s only doing it so Mira will agree to be the face of his new luxury perfume line.
René: “You told me you loved the pitch for creative reasons.”
Mogul: “It’s a fascinating project. But I’m told our viewers won’t find it binge-worthy.”
If you love movies, you’ll prove him wrong.