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Irma Vep
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The Risk Factor
The first moment that woke me up in the inaugural
episode of this series shows Alicia Vikander (as American blockbuster star
Mira) getting into character, away from the camera, as Louis Feuillade’s
immortal Irma Vep: she springs behind a wall and then, some seconds later,
without an intervening cut, reappears further up the stairs, positioned higher
in the frame. At last: the welcome breath of some mise en scène, allied with a lively performer!
The first thing to be said about Olivier Assayas’ re-tooling
of his excellent 1996
feature into an 8-part TV series: it’s a heck of a lot better than all
his films since at least Après mai (Something in the Air, 2012). In fact,
putting Irma Vep and Carlos (2010) together, it can now be
said that, in the 21st century, television brings out the best in
Assayas. Who would have guessed?
There’s a filmed conversation somewhere online between
Assayas and Kelly Reichardt. In it, she talks about her meticulous
pre-planning, her elaborate discussions with the cinematographer, her use of a
“look book”, storyboarding and other pictorial tools. Surely he does the same,
she wonders? Nope, he replies: more and more, beyond any pre-planning that is
strictly necessary (such as, say, writing the script), he likes to show up on
the set or location without a pre-thought in his head, and then simply try to
react to and “capture the reality” of the interaction unfolding before him. The
Innocent Eye!
This helps explain why so many of his recent films – Wasp Network (2019) was particularly
appalling – look so drab and bland, and are cut so listlessly. And, on this
level, so different to the Ingmar Bergman-inspired moving-and-switching choreography
of camera and actor of Assayas’ best work of the ‘90s. Now, it’s the Zero
Degree of mise en scène! And that
goes hand-in-glove with another unfortunate tendency in recent Assayas: his
turn to Sacha Guitry as lodestone and figurehead (whereas once the
reference-points tended, for good or ill, to Tarkovsky, Bresson, Godard, Renoir
… ) – resulting in a strange bet on an overall orientation of comedy of manners and a cinema of
dialogue, reaching its nadir in Doubles
vies (Non-Fiction, 2018).
That’s not necessarily, however, a cinema of acting
(and here the difference from Guitry the Master is striking): the gesture of casting seems more decisive to Assayas
these days than any fine-grain direction of the performances. It’s the actors
who bring in their styles, their personalities, their emblematic associations
(if they already possess them), their creativity; Assayas is their on-set
witness. Let me immediately add that many directors (including Robert Altman)
would agree 100% with this approach to filmmaking.
When the actor is Vincent Macaigne – very well cast
here in the role of René Vidal, the part that Jean-Pierre Léaud incarnated in ’96 – the method
pays off. Macaigne, an essentially comic (even burlesque) performer, projects,
better than ever before, an appealing mix of nuttiness, brusqueness and wounded
vulnerability (his scenes with a psychoanalyst played by Dominique Reymond
aren’t bad); his voice is a great tool. In this new Irma Vep, the figure of René no longer carries any emblematic
reference to the Glory Days of the Nouvelle Vague – too much time has passed
for that to work. Now René – reviving his old Irma Vep movie for a ‘limited’ TV series which is maybe (David
Lynch-style) “one big film” – stands, almost exclusively, for Assayas himself.
This is where some intriguing evaluative and interpretive questions/problems
arise.
At the age of 67 – which could be, I dare say, a bit
young for it – Assayas has gone full-on into self-anthology mode with Irma Vep. First, he’s revisiting his own
greatest (and first) moment of global cult success (it’s incredible to remember
now how Kent Jones introduced him to Film Comment readers in that year, admonishingly, as “a young
French director whose name you’re almost guaranteed not to know”) – and using
that to reflect on the situation of filmmakers in the TV streaming age. That’s
fair enough as a basic, reflexive premise. The ‘state of cinema today’ angle –
stranded between a declining arthouse niche and Marvel blockbusters – recalls
the loaded blather-quotient of Clouds of
Sils Maria (2014). But there’s also, for instance, the ubiquitous presence
of everyday technologies (mobile phones & screens), and the recourse to
phantasmic presences, which were prominent features of the weak Personal Shopper (2016).
Lars Eidinger as Gottfried, resident Bad Boy of the Irma Vep cast – I detected a nod here to
contemporary boorish provocateur Albert Serra – reminds us of the darker,
menacing figures that populated Assayas’ early youth-centred stories (Cold Water [1994], Désordre [1986], and his scripts for André Téchiné), but who have, alas, deserted his subsequent,
sunnier visions of communal and/or family life (Summer Hours, 2008). And on the recycling/self-referencing goes.
There will be a lot of commentary on the ways in which
the TV series both resembles and differs from the original film. Alex Descas is
back, just as he was. Jeanne Balibar more-or-less takes the “unrequited
lesbian” role that Nathalie Richard played in the original (they share the
Jacques Rivette connection). The music selection, which is all at once echoed
from the ’96 playlist (Mdou Moctar channeling Ali Farka Touré, Thurston Moore
from Sonic Youth), effectively updated (Khruangbin), and ingeniously
swapped-out (the 1960s nostalgia component this time is signalled by Early
Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well” and “Judy in Disguise” by John Fred & His Playboy
Band, not Serge Gainsbourg). The replacement of the Babel-like
non-communication of multiple languages in the original with a matter-of-fact
pan-Englishness (an ironic reflection of the needs and demands of the global TV
marketplace, no doubt …).
Some parts are massively expanded, such as the
generous clips from Feuillade’s The
Vampires (the 8 episode titles, such as “The Severed Head” and “Hypnotic
Eyes”, are a decent selection from the 1915-1916 serial) – and the
film-within-the-film recreations of them by Vidal, which are quite busy and
engaging, shot in a pleasingly stylised colour scheme and well scored, without
aiming for outright mimicry of any silent-cinema style. There’s a brave burst
of psychedelic choreography and song, unlike anything from either ’16 or ’96, that
makes us recall Assayas’ slight book on Kenneth Anger, as well as the exactly
contemporaneous and in some ways similar career paths of Assayas and Leos Carax … while also calling up the weekly club performances terminating each episode
of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017).
(The unseen “great director who makes a film once every six years” that Mira
hastens to meet in London is surely either Lynch or Assayas’ beloved writer-auteur
exemplar, David Cronenberg.)
Assayas has been canny enough to leave some things
entirely behind in the past: the central idea driving the original, that Maggie
Cheung was a “blank space” filled in by the gazes and projections of every
other character, would surely not have functioned across almost 8 hours of TV.
So it’s back to a relatively restrained comedy-of-manners ensemble, but with
touches of (melo)dramatic intrigue (sexual jealousies, etc.). I, in fact,
greatly prefer Vikander to Cheung in the central role: the latter seemed often to
be faking it in the midst of some semi-improvised scenes of confusion; the mode
didn’t come naturally to her. (Clean [2004] offered her a far better and more exacting showcase.)
Assayas somewhat crucifies himself on the sword of
topicality: a group conversation on “Me Too” issues (is a drugged Irma abused
and raped, and what about that Male Gaze Camera which enjoys it?) clumsily
straddles several episodes and kicks off a further layer – actually part of
Rene’s telefilm or not, it’s impossible to say – of “recreated scenes from the
life of Jeanne Roques” (i.e., Musidora) … where Macaigne plays Feuillade. It’s
hard to know whether Assayas is aiming for withering, satiric irony or arse-covering
rationalisation here (he flashed his bona fide feminist credentials during his
underwhelming Sabzian state-of-cinema
address of 2020).
On the plus side, I appreciate how Assayas has turned
a hallucinatory highlight of the original – Maggie “becoming” Irma and stealing
jewellery – into a “running ellipse”: Mira keeps disappearing behind this or
that hotel door, but we don’t at all follow her burgeoning career as a Bad Girl
thief (there’s no equivalent, for instance, to Arisinée Khanjian’s nude phone-call
cameo) until a heady rooftop scene superimposes images from the two versions.
Plus, there’s a supernatural twist to these corridor-and-rooftop escapades, one
not from ’96, that I won’t spoil.
A bad moment in the penultimate episode, one I was both
anticipating and dreading: what will René solipsistically do to the rushes of
his tele-masterpiece once he has withdrawn into his private hermitage? In the
original film, this reveal was the big, final shock, which worked for me and
offended some: there, René became vaguely a post-Nouvelle Vague Isidore Isou,
scratching and defacing the images, overlaying them with harsh concrète noises. Lettrist psychosis? The
underlying stereotype was neither fair nor accurate, but as a parting swerve
into abstraction (and away from plot resolution altogether) it wielded a
salutary kick – of a kind that Assayas has never been able to recapture with
his over-thought “dives into the unconscious” and other misjudged tactics in Demonlover (2002) or the execrable Boarding Gate (2007).
With the digital rushes edited on his home computer
rig, our 21st century René still seems to be “scratching on film” –
which makes no sense at all – and it looks like Assayas struggled to find some
transformational equivalent to the original gesture. And then the story reaches
out for some further twist of redemption in the name of the “spirit” of Feuillade,
Musidora and Irma … As he has done a few times before (notably at the end of Paris Awakes, 1991, when the hitherto
minor character of Agathe [Ounie Lecomte] is suddenly focused on in the final
scene), Assayas introduces, during the final episode, an entirely new character
(Lou Lampros as Galatée) who will sally forth – to the extent of hooking up
with newbie auteur Regina (Devon Ross), formerly Mira’s assistant – and carry
the “transmission” of something-or-other into a New and Young World (her pals
mock the work of poor old has-been René) …
As that last parenthetical detail signals in a
roundabout way, there is a pretentious aspect to this Irma Vep – and pretention is an insult I throw around rarely in my
collected film/TV criticism. I’ve avoided reading the director’s statements in
recent press interviews, but I get the sense that Assayas entertains a Rivette-size
ambition with this project – that Irma
Vep is, in some sense, his Out 1 (which also, we
should remember, easily ‘plays’ as a TV series). Like that avant-garde epic, Irma Vep is designed as a “floating
assemblage” of diverse pieces, elements and levels, deliberately not tightly
stitched together, and occasionally wavering in their diegetic reality-status.
Most Rivettian of all is the risk factor – “there is perhaps no great film without the sense
that it could have been a catastrophe, that it should have failed, without this
type of miracle that saved everything, through the combined force of work,
calculation and persistence” (Rivette to Hélène Frappat, 1999) – which, here,
centres on the figurative and literal ghost of René’s orginal Irma V., i.e.,
Assayas’ ex-wife Cheung. It was a cringey experience to open daily social media
during the unfolding weekly broadcasts and see people duly exclaim: “OMG,
Assayas really went there, he invoked
his failed marriage to Maggie?!” But is this so risky, after all? It struck me
as being as lightweight and whimsical in its self-referentiality as anything
else in the series. It didn’t seem much like a life-and-death self-exposure;
rather, a comfortable game.
I mentioned blather earlier. By the point in the final episode that we have heard one more
dialogue about the meaning of ‘spirits’ – as not only individual, haunting
phantoms or neuroses, but also collective ‘inspirations’ (arising from Assayas’
oft-repeated and scarcely convincing equation of group-filmmaking with
Situationist ‘situations’ in everyday life) – you may well believe you have,
literally, heard it all. Back in 1997, Assayas did an interesting
interview-dialogue with critic-scholar-programmer Bérénice Reynaud in which he
outlined an idea of invocation at
work in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky (specially Mirror,
1974) – a complex technique and affect to which he clearly aspired as a
creator.
But the ghost of invocation (of My Demon Brother?) has
well and truly deserted him over the past decade; these days, everything is
articulated by the characters ad nauseam,
sometimes to the point of resembling the position-taking on a TV chat show (or
interminable podcast). Very contrary to what he once would have learned from
the apprenticeship with Téchiné (see Wild Reeds, 1994), all
of the ‘subtext’ has now been converted into spoken text. And, for just once in
my lifetime, I feel compelled to call in thundering old Robert McKee: Show, don’t tell!
© Adrian Martin 26-28 July 2022 |
