Embedded in the concept and practice of a remake is the notion of fealty to what came before; a looming question mark that determines the approach of the artist and the angle of their critics — at once daunting and welcoming, a challenge disguised as a warning. What does it really mean to be “faithful,” and at what point do you have to let go and have a little faith? This is precisely what the fictional director(s) René Vidal can’t seem to wrap his head around, slavishly devoted to mimeographing every winding narrative curlicue of Louis Feuillade’s seminal, iconic, essential (you name it) 1915 silent serial Les Vampires. To call it “seminal” doesn’t even cut it, and Olivier Assayas knew as much while filming his 1996 film Irma Vep, which starred his soon-to-be-wife Maggie Cheung as a fictional version of herself attempting to play the title character in a doomed remake.
The film is a disarmingly modest backstage dramedy, and the kind of masterpiece whose raptures feel almost accidental — though of course, they are anything but. The prospect of remaking Irma Vep, and somehow recapturing its lightning-in-a-bottle seriocomic power, raised more than a few eyebrows, but Assayas’ newly minted A24/HBO miniseries is less a remake than a palimpsest, returning to the same template with more than two decades of hindsight and fundamentally reshaping how it functions. If anything, it plays more like an abstract game of cat’s cradle with Feuillade’s pulp yarn stretched, plucked, and warped into all sorts of slick, dazzling shapes over Assayas’ personal framework. He’s basically done the impossible, not only capturing (and conjuring) the serial’s spirit but contextualizing its lasting relevance to the medium at large.
For starters, Les Vampires’ potboiler sheen betrays the tectonic cultural shift it both depicts and connotes; Feuillade shades and sculpts a plastic world made lively and rigid by violence, with the titular miscreants swooping in to puncture a collective quixotic stupor. But who or what are the vampires exactly? The film’s intertitles describe them as gangsters, but their monetary gains seem almost incidental to their crimes. They’re more like terrorists, inflicting panic and injurious hijinks with gleeful abandon, but they lack a salient ideology, savoring their exploits and then flippantly discarding them for the next thrill. Their only ethos is mayhem.
It’s a very pure, naïve form of cartoon villainy, and it makes sense in the context of France mid-World War I, when mass death and uncertainty were made more immediate than ever through turn-of-the-century technologies. These innovations, narrative cinema among them, permeate the cloak-and-dagger shenanigans, aiding and abetting all manner of sinful transgressions; it’s in this regard that the vampires call to mind the car-wreck-fetishists of David Cronenberg’s Crash (another Cannes ’96 title). Not only do the criss-cross patterns of lust among the group closely resemble those within and between the vampires and their arch-criminal rival Juan José Moreno (Fernand Herrmann), but — like their antecedents — their desire, their bloodlust, and their place in a modernizing world all coalesce into alluring, grisly spectacles that finally and spectacularly consume their participants.
A specific, repeating image captures the vampires’ distinctive libidinal drive: that of two members, a man and a woman, dancing to entertain the rest of the gang. They thrash and cavort with anarchic, pugilistic fervor, jerking, twisting, and clawing at one another with the confused excitement of a couple who can’t decide if they’re fighting or fucking. This confusion finds its match in the final shot of Crash: an ill-fated twosome enshrined on the fine line between the little death and the big one, hopelessly humping as their car catches fire, waiting for the world to end. It’s the deflating come-down that defines the erotic fixations in all of Cronenberg’s cinema — the itch that’s only briefly relieved, and often made worse, by the scratch — and it fits snugly over top the looping, cyclical patterns of Les Vampires as well. Assayas has expressed an admiration for Cronenberg before, and he elaborates on it in his own films, from his unique spin on the director’s terse, laconic style to the off-kilter characterizations which hover breathlessly between caricature and cypher.
Vidal is the most prominent and instructive case of this, originally played by New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud and now by Assayas-veteran Vincent Maçaigne. Léaud’s wizened, dignifiedly bumbling take on the character was a stand-in for all the washed-up New Wave directors who floundered in the final decades of the 20th century, but Maçaigne is instead fashioned as a stand-in for Assayas himself. In this new trend of auteur autofiction, it’s refreshing to see a director so ruthlessly poke fun at himself, and Maçaigne gives one of the finest comedic performances of the year — every line and micro-tantrum squeaked and stammered out with such precise timing and intonation that each eventual outburst feels both startling and predictable. The self-deprecation is balanced expertly with genuine, sobering self-reflection when Vidal-Assayas finally collapses inward from the pressure of his prickly work environment.
In these moments, his ex-wife Jade Lee (a transparent stand-in for Maggie Cheung, played by Vivan Wu) appears to him as counsel — whether her presence is imaginary or supernatural is left casually unexplained. During a scene in the penultimate episode, she crosses paths with the protagonist, and the pair discuss her relationship with Vidal, even breaking the narrative logic by referencing the ’96 film. Her slightly detached and weary performance suggests an awareness of her status as image — in Vidal-Assayas’ memory and in the imagination of her audience — as opposed to character, and gives her scenes a sense of unreal warmth that captures the emotional connotations that go with a shared history bound up in heartbreak and unresolved distance.
On the note of unreality that gets at a deeper truth: Alicia Vikander’s leading turn as Mira Harberg, the rising blockbuster headliner who’s come to Vidal’s Paris television shoot to give her image an arthouse kick, is a similarly unsung high wire act that balances a hardened cynicism with the out-of-her-depth-ness of her larger-than-(real)-life predecessor. The millennial rasp and calculated coolness gradually begin to falter as layers of her romantic and sexual life are peeled back in ways both vicious and tender, and the full portrait emerges of a woman who’s forced to wear her stardom like armor.
This protective layer of faux savvy is exactly what Maggie Cheung lacks in the 1996 film, where her character is more immediately relatable to the audience in her state of perpetual response to the demands and foibles of her surroundings, and her directness and honesty (and jet-lag-addled discomfort and bemusement) accentuate the supporting comedic performances but also lend her a beguiling inscrutability. She is possessed by the spirit of Irma Vep and all the iconic images that go with it while also inhabiting the new ones that defined her career. Vikander on the other hand is playing an entirely fictional character, and her career — in spite of an Oscar win — is hardly comparable to that of Cheung’s. This makes her job that much trickier; unassisted by the borrowed context of her own life, Vikander and Assayas pattern Mira’s behaviour in step with Irma Vep and, perhaps more importantly, the legendary actress Musidora herself — the space between these two poles, or lack thereof, is where the performance gathers power.
Much of this patterning is achieved through the introduction of filmed passages from Musidora’s diary, which give us brief glimpses into how the scenes the present-day crew are shooting were filmed back in the 1910s. Each cast member plays their contemporary analogue — Vikander is Musidora, Maçaigne is Feuillade, Lars Eidinger (another Assayas alum) is Fernand Herrmann, and so on — which in turn opens new avenues of comparison between the two series. By Irma Vep’s logic you are what you play, and in this case, you are everyone who played what you’re playing; Les Vampires’ ostensible protagonist Phillippe Guerrande is (in a way that prefigures Hitchcock) a charmless and uptight party-pooper performed with an air of self-importance and insecurity, as if Edouard Mathé knew that in spite of his place at the story’s centre, Feuillade had structured the show to spiral out and away from its least interesting figure and toward all the director’s more taboo fixations and fetishes.
This insecurity is of course the defining feature of Edmond Lagrange (Vincent Lacoste), whose frustration with the role is one of the series’ many running jokes. Maçaigne’s brief turn as Feuillade highlights the auteur megalomania that endured through different outlets, but Vikander’s take on Musidora is surprisingly similar to her take on Harberg. Vidal describes Irma Vep as “a soul floating around waiting for a host,” but the “possession” the series depicts isn’t exactly possessive — Mira and Jade at two different points describe themselves as “here and not here,” clearly in control of themselves but also in negotiation with an external force. The spectre allows Jade to appear outside of herself, thousands of miles away from where she lives, and it allows Mira to walk through walls.
To Assayas, Irma Vep is the ur-image of transgressive femininity whose sensuality forever changed the way women occupy the screen. Vikander’s job is to inhabit that image with the foreknowledge that a modern actress could never live up to it. Instead of transforming it, as Cheung did, refine it, give it shape, and express it as an extension of everything that came before.
In this sense it follows that a requirement from the cast across the board is an awareness of the camera, and an awareness of image. This nicely compliments the performance styles in Les Vampires; the actors perform with a capital P, folding theatrical histrionics into cinematic contortionism, the constructed nature of the narrative and those who populate it loudly and cheekily announced in capital letters. Certain supporting characters are cast with dead ringers of the stars, and thus when characters die, they seem to reappear in different trappings and contexts; death is not the end, identity is malleable, and images will continue to pass through us as long as we remain open to receiving them.
These issues are the subject of debates in Irma Vep — ones both unspoken and playfully drawn out. Assayas’ winkingly bloviated intellectual writing is the direct inverse of Feuillade’s crude and pulpy displays of staccato violence, but these opposites serve a similar purpose for their respective narratives and scribes; lush verbal sparring has become something of a calling card in Assayas’ late period, but he’s always used dialogue to accentuate body language (many of these scenes have moments of sexual tension that go verbally unarticulated), and in a silent film, body language is everything. Feuillade’s command of the human body, and the seedier impulses it communicates, can be seen then as a more immediately expressive way of engineering interpersonal conflict than the calmly bilious exchanges within Vidal’s crew. In both methods, slapstick merges with catharsis in fits and starts, and the spaces between are buoyed by a relaxed and patient camera.
The static compositions of Les Vampires were at least partially a technological limitation — one that both represses and emphasizes the sordid subject matter to satisfyingly pressurized heights — while the drifty and halting camerawork in Irma Vep represents a late-style departure from Assayas’ off-kilter handheld approach — on full display in the ’96 film, as well as the many faithfully restaged scenes from Les Vampires that appear throughout the series. These scenes are a by-product of the television format, which gives the director almost six additional hours to expound on and complicate the source texts, and also play around with them in ways he finds sexy or funny or exciting. This passion and warmth come through even in the show’s meanest moments, not only counteracting the knowing cynicism of embracing the in-vogue streaming format but also displaying the director’s personal growth.
The original film’s conclusion sees Léaud’s Vidal destroy the rushes for his movie after being booted from the project; the reels have been mangled and remixed into a dizzying and rapturous whirlwind of implosive imagery, the abstract and vindictive beauty serving as the film’s one sight of closure while also expanding its purview beyond humanity, as if the cinema were some promethean fire given to us by mistake, a gift mistreated and under appreciated by opportunists and snobs. Vidal’s career takes its dying breath, and Cheung flies to the states to be in a Ridley Scott movie — a confusing blip in her career.
The ending of the show, however, strikes a balance between cinematic and human sense of closure, giving Mira the artistic fulfillment of having completed the shoot under René’s vision, and René the personal fulfillment of reconciling with his current wife. Mira claims that René and the spirit of Irma Vep revived her love for acting, and properly prepared her for her exciting new part in a literary adaptation. René’s wife asks if he loves herself and their children as much as his films, to which he responds “more.” When challenged, he says “movies take me so far away, but love always brings me back to you.” It’s the final line of the show, spoken in tandem with a catsuited Vikander’s descent from out of the projector screen and ascent to the Paris rooftops, as if to say, “my work here is done.”
The whole project constantly risks coming off as navel-gazing, but at every turn proves remarkably humble and expansive. At the end of the day, it’s a show about how one man’s love for movies shapes the way he interacts with the world — old news, sure, but Irma Vep finds beauty in the fact that old things escape obsolescence by taking on new shapes.
