A remake of a film about a remake of a more than a hundred-year-old series may at first sound like something completely complicated, perhaps even pointless, but the distinguished French filmmaker Olivier Assayas made a mini-series that turned out to be a real refreshment. The film of the same name from 1996, which was also a satire on the state of the French film industry at the time, is still one of Assayas’ greatest successes, and the role of Irma Vep, which was then played by the Hong Kong actress and his later wife Maggie Chung, now belongs to a Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who is also the co-producer of the series.
Vikander is Mira Harberg, a famous Hollywood actress who has just finished shooting a mega-successful blockbuster, and sees the offer to appear in an artistic French series that is also a remake of Louis Feulliade’s “Les Vampires” series from 1916 as an opportunity to change the direction in which her career is going. At the same time, she is recovering from a breakup with her former assistant Laurie (Adria Arjona), who left her for blockbuster director Herman Ray (Byron Bowers). Also, her appearance in the series is an opportunity for her to collaborate with the respected but also eccentric art director Rene Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), a neurotic freak but also a visionary who decided to film a modern remake of a classic from the silent film era.
And although it is a remake, Assayas managed to do it perfectly and the eight-part series proved to be the right format for breathing new freshness into this story, expanding and deepening it, but also a great joke and satire on the world of movies and television. Here, Assayas plays excellently with the very concept of shooting a film or series, working on set in general, constant conflicts between actors and other employees on set, ego and vanity contests, differences in the vision of the content, and teasing at the expense of numerous current social phenomena.
The very idea that someone today would remake a series filmed more than a century ago, in such a way as to almost literally try to copy scenes from a silent film, seems completely absurd. However, “Irma Vep” subtly moves the boundaries of absurdism because it is completely clear how much has changed in the entire process of making the film over the past hundred years. It is a series that also raises the question of the direction in which the film is going today, because while the mainstream is mostly taken over by superficial entertainment for the masses, art film increasingly goes to a completely different extreme and often turns into the most ordinary jerking off for the own taste of conceited and vain men and a woman that no one can look at or understand.
“Irma Vep” is also a clever joke about today’s political correctness, the MeToo movement, exaggeration in everything and anything, and the fear that someone will be offended by the most ordinary banalities. Thus, today, during the filming of “hot scenes” in films, the help of “experts” called intimacy coordinators is used, so Assayas also brilliantly satirizes this absurdity when, in an actually benign scene, his director has to hire a bondage consultant. All these conflicting and borderline situations, which probably often happen on filming, are often brought to extremes and absurdity here, and the whole situation will become even crazier when the excessive German actor Gottfried appears on the set (genius Lars Eidinger is reason enough to watch this series) .
This guy is a walking chaos, who immediately after arriving in Paris asks his assistant to get him crack because he can’t film otherwise. His character is probably a conglomeration of probably all similar eccentric and problematic, equally wild and spoiled, but also genius types that have existed in the world of cinema. So he claims that he was a homosexual, but he stopped being so when it became fashionable and almost everyone became gay. Because of his escapades, the filming of “Vampire” almost fails when, like David Carradine, he is found hanging in a closet during a perverted sex game.
Vikander is also in good form, who apparently enjoys playing herself, a young actress who is stuck with blockbusters, and would rather work on something she considers real art. As time will pass, she will merge more and more with the character of Irma Vep, the main character of the series in which she stars, also a girl who is a hired assassin for the Vampiri gang, and who was once embodied by the famous French actress Musidora, with whom she will also begin to identify . Although Mira is undoubtedly a star, she feels somewhat insecure, lonely, as if at a turning point and trying to figure out what to do with her life and career. She seems to have lost her will and passion for acting, but then this series will appear and her will and passion seem to return.
It’s a great series about creating an illusion, a fiction, something that a film is at its core, so in one situation, the mentally increasingly unstable director points out that when he shoots a film, it’s as if he’s entering an alternative reality from which it’s difficult to get out when the shooting ends and after remains completely empty. Assayas managed to capture the state of mind of today’s film industry in a unique, original and truly refreshing way. Industries that seem to want to be both fucking and honest at the same time, that is, to make profits at the same time, while adhering to some aesthetic and artistic standards that are often in complete conflict and do not go with each other. “Irma Vep” is a series that should be to the taste of film buffs and those open to somewhat different contents than what we usually assume when we start watching a modern television series.