More than twenty-five years later we return to the fateful filming of the remake of ‘Les Vampires’ in ‘Irma Vep’, a new version of Olivier Assayas’ 1996 film that comes to HBO Max in miniseries format. And, attention, because we have one of the most attractive fictions of the year.
With Assayas himself writing and directing, and Alicia Vikander (‘Operation UNCLE’) as the lead, we moved to Paris to get into the ins and outs of filming a series (or eight-hour movie) based on the French silent serial.
Self-aware of its remake condition
The first thing that catches the eye of ‘Irma Vep’ it’s how self-aware he is of the fact that it’s a remake and he plays with it (and it is self-referential in that René Vidal has already made an ‘Irma Vep’ and married its protagonist) in what moves us by Assayas’ typical commentary on the film industry, this time with a bit of steroids.
A world that we enter through Mira, Vikander’s character, as the protagonist of this production. For her it is a change of scenery at a time when she is already tired of great blockbusters (we just caught her in the middle of promoting her latest film) and she thinks that a project like this, further away from big studios, will be a breath of fresh air.
If the 1996 film revolved among other things with the concept of a fish out of water (with Maggie Cheung being this fish), more than two decades later the industry has changed a lot and international casts and co-productions are becoming more and more frequent. In this sense culture shock is relatively minor in the weight of history.
Which is not to say that we don’t see Mira change and adapt. Little by little (and already from the first costume fitting), she will stop being her facet of a good and obedient girl, prefabricated in the hollywood moldto show his rebellious and disheveled side in the midst of an increasingly chaotic shoot.
This is accompanied by a director (Vincent Macaigne), with anxiety and depression problemsmaniac, obsessed with following the script to the letter and resigned to the fact that his “film” (divided into eight episodes, takes aim at the blurring of the line between cinema and television) will be seen in, that, in a TV instead of on the big screen.
A witty but thought-provoking miniseries
Despite Assayas’ ingenuity in putting characters into the mouths of many of the debates going on today, both in real life and in filmtwittera Sometimes they remain more like comments on the air than something that invites reflection. It’s kind of basic, but it doesn’t go against the tone of ‘Irma Vep’ at all.
In a certain sense, seeing the different characters that swarm around this shoot, each one with their nerves and their way of working and understanding the industry, is almost like being in front of the Logans of ‘Succession’ but with something less than “motherfucker“and depth. At least in that tone of somewhat satirical drama that they share.
But Assayas manages to make those buts that we can put to ‘Irma Vep’ unimportant due to his magnificent directing workwhich puts us into this cinematographic world in the most natural way possible.
The end result is that ‘Irma Vep’ is one of the most unique proposals so far this year: a sly, metatextual miniseries who with great ingenuity explores the ins and outs of cinema while not losing sight of the evolution of his characters.