Irma Vep

I got a free coupon for Blockbuster the other day and used it last night to view Irma Vep, by Olivier Assayas. As I may have mentioned in an earlier post, I am not a great fan of French “cinema,” but even at my most bitter I could never present an indictment of the last half-century of that nation’s cinematic output more damning than this film.

Billed as an “anti-film,” Irma Vep was reportedly scripted in ten days and shot in less than a month. It looks it. The production values are nil, the plot incoherent, much of the dialogue seems to have been ad libbed, the acting is uneven, and its themes are confused and poorly presented. Yet with all of that it was one of the most interesting movies I’ve seen recently.

The premise is a cliché -- a movie about making a movie, which is a remake of a still earlier movie. OK you postmodernists, is that reflexive enough for you? I’ll take it even further. Maggie Cheung, the Hong Kong action star, plays herself [how postmodern], an actress hired to play the lead character in a remake of a classic French action serial and, get this, the character she plays was, in the original serial, an actress who also was a leader of a criminal gang. So you have an actress playing the part of an actress who is reprising the role played by another actress who was herself playing an actress. Got that? Good!

A little movie history here: Back in 1915, while World War I was raging, the French public was captivated by an adventure serial by Louis Feuillade titled Les Vampires. These were not the blood-sucking types, simply a criminal gang of thieves that used high-tech devices, like poison gas, to prey upon the French elite. One of the leaders of the gang was a popular actress named Irma Vep, whose name is an anagram for “Vampire.” The serial was shown in ten segments, totaling more than 7 ½ hours in length.

The setup to this film is the proposition that Reny Vidal, once a major director but now in decline, has decided to do a remake of the old silent serial. He has gotten some money from the government, has assembled a cast and crew, and to play the star, Irma Vep, he has brought in Maggie Cheung, the Hong Kong action star. The part of Reny Vidal is played by Jean-Pierre Leaud. You remember him – he was the kid in Truffaut’s 400 blows and a major star through the glory days of the French New Wave. Casting him in the lead only emphasizes how very long ago those glory days were. Once bright and young and fresh and adored, the remnants of la nouvelle vague are now, for the most part, sour old cranks [like yourself? Ed. Now, now, let’s not get nasty, he's parodying Goddard].

Bringing in a Chinese star, who, it is emphasized throughout, knows nothing about French “cinema” and doesn’t even speak French, is an admission that the real vitality in modern movie making is far from French shores. Even more damning, Maggie and the rest of the crew are able to communicate only in English, which they all speak [some better than others]. Maggie seems to be the only one completely fluent [she was raised in England]. Even when they are taking shots at American overproduction and extravagance, the characters have to do so in English. This is a French-language film, subtitled in English, but at least half of the dialogue is in English. The film is thus a tacit admission of Anglospheric cultural dominance, even in France’s artistic community.

The production does not go smoothly. Right from the beginning nobody in the production crew seems to be in charge and all is confusion. Maggie is a good sport, though, and tries to accommodate the director’s dream. But Reny is so out of touch with reality that he might be considered delusional. He has become obsessed with Maggie’s grace and beauty, especially as demonstrated in the martial arts action scenes of her Hong Kong flicks. So obsessed is he with the image, rather than the reality, of Maggie that he pays no attention when she explains, repeatedly, that she is no fighter and that the action scenes were mostly performed by her stunt double.

Two thirds of the way through the movie Reny has a nervous breakdown and cannot finish. A new director, Jose Mirano, (played by Lou Castel) is brought in, but he’s little improvement. He only takes the job to get off the government dole. He drinks constantly and on his first day on the set has trouble negotiating the short distance between his taxi and the studio door. What’s more, he wants to undo everything Reny has envisioned. That means firing Maggie Cheung and hiring a French actress who will embody his own deluded obsession with the virtue and vitality of the French working class. Untethered art, in his hands, will be bound to the service of political didacticism.

Thus in the two directors we see the two cancers that have afflicted French “cinema” for the past half century and more – irresponsible artistic intellectualism, and crass political activism. The point regarding political content had been driven home earlier in the film when, at a party, members of the crew spent their time gazing nostalgically at images clipped from the political films they had made when they were young. That was then, but now those images are clearly irrelevant and the party goers turn away from them to dance to a song about Bonnie and Clyde, yet another subtle reminder that over the past third of a century American movies and culture have completely eclipsed French “cinema.” Incidents like these furthermore give the lie to those left wing critics who have tried to insist that Irma Vep is an attack on capitalist values. It isn't. They just think that because it is French it must be.

In Irma Vep, Maggie Cheung is the outsider surveying the ruins of French cinema. At first she is accommodating, willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. And to the end she argues that there is something compelling about Reny’s vision. But her faith is challenged by an obnoxious French interviewer who accuses her of merely being “polite” when she defends Reny. It is clear from the interview that he is less interested in her, the star, than in denouncing French movies for being too intellectual and lacking the masculine vitality of John Woo’s action pictures (which he mistakenly thinks she was in).

In the film this interviewer functions as the voice of the director. Assayas, it is clear, will allow no defense of the current state of French cinema or critical community. He even anticipates the objections of critics, like Jonathan Rosenbaum, who writes in Chicago Reader that the real focus of Irma Vep is “cinema” in general, not just French “cinema.” It should be considered representative, he argues, of a multinational genre of films about films not of a national tradition. But throughout Irma Vep invidious distinctions are drawn between French, and other national industries. French production crews are chaotic, and therefore inferior to the more professional Japanese. French films are too intellectual and feminine and lack the masculine vigor of Hong Kong products. French films are made on a shoestring and lack the technical sophistication of Hollywood. No, Assayas makes it clear that his devastating indictment is specific to French “cinema.”

He doesn’t even allow reverence for the nation’s filmic past. In making Irma Vep, Reny is trying to recapture the greatness of early French film industry, but he is clearly delusional and his pretensions are deflated when a cast member comments that Les Vampires was at best mediocre fiction. And what about the vaunted New Wave? Aside from the wasted image of Reny, who represents that era, there is a throughout the film a constant evocation of the visual and editing techniques that made that era famous. All the quirks of nouvelle vague are here – the hand-held cameras, the quick cuts, the montage, the overlapping dialogue, the documentary feel – but what is being documented is dissolution, dissipation and chaos.

So much for the past and present, what about the future? Again Maggie Cheung carries the story forward, even after she leaves the film. Asked what will be done about his old star, Castel replies that she’ll be given a first class plane ticket and will go back to Hong Kong. She doesn’t, though. To the consternation of the crew, who had fouled up her reservations, she goes to New York to meet with Ridley Scott and then on to Hollywood to meet with her agent. She is moving on into the cinematic future while the French remain mired in corruption, decadence and a delusional nostalgia for their past.

Of course there is more to Irma Vep than Gallic self-loathing. There is a thin fragment of plotting here and there. One narrative deals with Maggie’s attempt to get into the role of a criminal gang leader. She dons the vampire costume, really a sexual fetish outfit purchased in a sex shop, and begins to prowl around her hotel. She steals into another room and purloins a jeweled necklace, just like the cat burglar she is playing. But Assayas turns this suspenseful interlude, which many critics cite as the high point of the film, into a voyeuristic travesty as Maggie, clothed in darkness, stands and watches a naked woman in the next room. She takes the necklace, escapes with it to the roof, just like Irma in the early serial, but this is mere role-playing, acting for herself, and in the end she simply drops the necklace into an alley and returns to her room. It is significant that her best acting takes place off the set and away from the camera and is witnessed by nobody but herself.

There is also a sort of love story. During costume fitting the wardrobe mistress, Zoe (played by Nathalie Richard) develops an obsession with Maggie. At first it seems plausible. The two women are friendly, and Maggie seems to be turned on a bit by the fetish costume. She accompanies Zoe to a party where the hostess blatantly inquires regarding her sexual preferences. Maggie is embarrassed, but doesn’t clearly reject the idea. Is she simply being polite or is she interested? So the question is, “will they or won’t they?” Many members of the crew assume that Zoe has made another conquest. But Maggie learns, as the production is falling apart, that Zoe is a drug addict and pusher who is a disruptive influence everywhere she goes. In the end she politely and considerately declines Zoe's offer, just prior to flying off to America, whereupon the rejected Zoe seeks solace in drugs and stumbles off into the night.

By including the attempted lesbian seduction, Assayas is trying to repudiate another line of criticism, currently popular to the point of being a cliché. Several feminist critics have seen the film as yet another meditation on the “male gaze” and the objectification of women. Maggie, they argue, is dressed up in latex and fetishized by males, including those in the audience. But here the obsessive gaze turned in Maggie’s direction is that of a predatory lesbian who is also the one dressing her in latex. Assayas thus deprives the feminists of their most favored argument, but that doesn’t stop them from advancing it anyway.

Assayas’ ultimate target is the intellectualization of movies by producers, directors, and especially by critics. For decades, ever since the New Wave, French film makers have been producing movies that are more fun to write about than to actually see. They, as the interviewer (the director’s alter ego) complains, are gazing at their own navels, oblivious to their audience. Here Assayas is sounding a populist theme just as Feuillade did in the original serial, only their targets are different. Feuillade in 1915 railed against the inequalities of society and the pretensions of the bourgeoisie; Assayas is assailing intellectual elites, in both the film and critical communities. And the joke is that many of them don’t even recognize the attack. When, at the end of the film, we are allowed to see Reny’s product it is an absurd, violent, childish travesty of art – a sick parody of avant garde silliness, circa Man Ray. Yet several critics have taken it to be a hint of the direction that French “cinema” must take if it is to regain its serious status. Assayas must have laughed heartily when he read that, or perhaps he merely smiled knowingly.

There is a final, postmodern joke in Irma Vep. The director, through the interviewer, complains about the intellectualization of French film and its obsessive navel gazing; and when he does so the film comments on itself. What is Irma Vep but an intellectual exercise in navel gazing; a look inward at the French film community, a world populated by aging mad directors, disorganized and squabbling crews, disillusioned and cynical actors, lesbians, drug addicts, alcoholics, and the like, all subsidized by the government? It is a sad and nihilistic view, one that few in the general public would care to see. So in the end Assayas has failed. He has produced a slashing and devastating critique of French film, but it is still a movie that is more fun to talk about than to see.