The new “Irma Vep,” for all the behind-the-scenes turbulence it shows us, ends on a more hopeful note. Maggie is also replaced, unsurprisingly, by a white French actor. The director, also named René Vidal (and played by the great Jean-Pierre Léaud), is replaced. “Irma Vep” is a serialized remake of Assayas’ 1996 feature of the same title, which also follows an actor - in this case, the Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung, playing a version of herself - who has been cast in a remake of “Les Vampires.” From the moment she arrives, Maggie is our guide to a production that never finds its footing and ultimately collapses. That could be an allusion to the increasingly blurry, dreamlike power this “Irma Vep” exudes as it unfolds, or perhaps the waking nightmare that the shoot soon becomes. Those actors (they include Vincent Lacoste and Hippolyte Girardot), struggling to accommodate their egos within the parameters of an early 20th century text, constantly question their characters’ motivations while refusing to examine their own.Įveryone is at the financial mercy of a cosmetics giant that has bankrolled the production solely in hopes of convincing Mira to become the face of its new fragrance, Dreamscape. The wildly neurotic director, René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), has a bad habit of verbally and sometimes physically attacking his actors. From day one, mayhem and chaos have been this production’s only real constants. Now, it’s entirely possible that Gottfried, a cocaine addict who has a close brush with death mid-production, simply hasn’t been paying attention.
Where is the sense of adventure? Where’s the mayhem? Where’s the chaos?”
“Who’s willing to put their life on the line for movies? We live in boring, dark, dull times. Later in the same episode, Mira’s raucous German co-star, Gottfried (Lars Eidinger), will celebrate his last day of shooting by spraying the crew with Champagne and destroying a few pieces of furniture, part of a life of hedonistic risk tied to his ride-or-die belief in the movies: “Cinema was the wild west.
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Enjoying a free moment with another actor, Cynthia (Fala Chen), Mira quietly extols the power of cinema and laments its growing obsolescence in a content-saturated era: “Movies are a portal to some sort of spiritual world we don’t have access to anymore,” she says. One speaker is Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander), a Hollywood star who’s playing the Parisian jewel thief Irma Vep in a remake of “Les Vampires,” Louis Feuillade’s 1915 crime serial.
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For a show as deliriously playful as “Irma Vep,” the HBO limited series created, written and directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, its deepest truths are often the most bluntly spoken.