The Return of ‘Irma Vep’

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Les Vampires was a French silent film series (1915-16) that continues to inspire for its audacious weirdness—and its female villain, perhaps cinema’s first true villainous, Irma Vep, central to a mindboggling criminal underworld of sinister men in top hats and capes. The new HBO Max series Irma Vep is about a make-believe remake of a fictitious ‘90s art house remake of the real silent serial. Yes, it’s complicated, sophisticated, multi-leveled and “meta.”

Irma Vep stars Alicia Vikander as Mira, a big star in Hollywood eager to play Irma in the remake by esteemed French director Rene Vidal (Vincent Macaigne). Vidal is a stand-in for the HBO series’ director, French filmmaker Olivier Assayas and like the real-life director, the fictional filmmaker made an Irma Vep movie years ago, marrying and divorcing his lead actress. Vidal is in psychoanalysis throughout the series. He’s neurotic, self-destructive and visionary, always in danger of melting down in the face of unruly actors and Euro-pinching financiers who no longer believe in the art of film (if ever they did).

But Mira is the star, and her part reflects Vikander’s reality as a Swedish actress who became the star of blockbuster schlock such as Tomb Raider as well as the provocative science-fiction thriller Ex Machina. Mira is Irma Vep’s bankable factor in the eyes of the production’s financial backers. She’s smarter than the dumb Hollywood flicks that have won her celebrity. She wants something more—to be challenged, to get beyond the dull cliches of her industry. Mira navigates the red carpets, the autograph-and-selfie seeking fans, the press conferences, the fashion photo shoots, with aplomb—and a shrug. She’s watched Les Vampires from start to finish, three times, and is as fascinated with Irma Vep as her director.

She’s also sexually fluid whose boundaries shift as easily as the fact and fiction of Irma Vep. Mira is stunning in the recreated costume worn by the original Irma, a black silk form-fitting body suit that inspires her to slip up stairways and around doorways with feline body language.

According to some reports, Assayas was given only one week to write the series’ eight episodes and the result is as loose and surprising as the controlled chaos of a film set. One wonders how many happy accidents occurred outside the script, yet the production moves forward with confidence and purpose, building its narrative with snippets from the original black-and-white Les Vampires and the in-color remake-in-progress along with the personal and professional intrigue swirling around the production.

Irma Vep is compounded from conversations. Along the way, the many characters expound on sex, drugs and rock and roll (it’s dead) and the decay of beauty. Actors search for the motivations of their characters; the director has anxiety over his artistic influences and the freedom of early cinema to invent itself is discussed. The art of film is shown to cross the line into dangerous fantasy—or quoting Kenneth Anger, can it literally be a magical invocation? Les Vampires is itself critiqued for its sprawling illogic, even its political incorrectness by the 2022 standards, but perhaps its refusal to be reasonable remains central for its appeal to the imagination more than a century on.

As put by Mira’s film school-grad PA, Regina (Devon Ross), the movie industry has become too aware of what audiences want. It’s just industry, not art. Or as shouted out by the anarchic German actor Gottfried (Lars Eidlinger), real film can still be an antidote to our present epoch. “We live in boring, dark, dull times,” he declares—an era dominated by big data, franchises and media platforms.

Adding to Irma Vep’s cool is the mysterious, sensuous score by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Film buffs will recognize many allusions to cinema history, among them the influence of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus on Mira’s shape-shifting scenes and the Goblin LP prominent in the living room of Vidal’s Paris apartment.