The Two of Us
Karen Bowers Revisits Irma Vep
Twenty years ago, I wrote my first essay for Reverse Shot in the fall 2003 symposium devoted to director Olivier Assayas on Irma Vep (1996). I was drawn to Assayas's charming, self-referential film about filmmaking, centering my essay on its Hong Kong–based star Maggie Cheung. The film is set during the production of an art-house movie remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 French serial starring an actress previously known for her action roles who has come to France to make her first foray into international cinema. I pitched that essay to the editors for their newly formed project because I thought it would prove fascinating to pull apart the intermingling of the real actress’s career with the fictional character Maggie.
Like Assayas, I had been familiar with Cheung from her action films, including Heroic Trio, which I had seen as a cinema studies student at NYU while taking an Asian cinema survey course, and I wanted to write about this magnetic performer as more than just a practitioner of elaborate stunt choreography. In Irma Vep, not only was she giving a dramatic, naturalistic performance but also a potentially autobiographical one, in a foreign country acting in one of her five fluent languages. I wrote, watching “Maggie for nearly two hours play ‘herself,’ we still are no closer to understanding her than we are to comprehending her character within the film, the mysterious thief, Irma Vep, leader of the Vampires.” Assayas makes her fish-out-of-water character both our point of view in navigating a film set and an unknowable figure of fascination when she dons the skintight Irma Vep latex catsuit to creep around Paris hotel corridors, blurring the lines between character and method actor.
Irma Vep has been back on my mind since watching Assayas’s eight-episode, limited-run Irma Vep series for HBO in 2022. Like many streaming-era cineastes, I’ve migrated from weekly visits to art-house theaters to staying home to watch more on my television or laptop for convenience and accessibility. Also, since 2003, I had stopped making my living writing regularly about film, becoming just an avid follower of the industry from the vantage point of an educated civilian. Assayas rewards those of us film history nerds on our couches with a running time of more than seven hours (up from 97 minutes), expanding his original concept with a flashier production design, a bigger cast of characters with complex motivations, and a show-within-a-show concept. It was also clearly a personal project as Assayas took his surrogate character from the movie, director René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne in the series; his character was previously played by François Truffaut’s muse Jean-Pierre Léaud), and made him more central to the plot and a clearer stand-in for Assayas. In returning and reworking so many elements of this formative text, I found it illuminating to tease apart the threads of the TV show to try and imagine what Assayas thinks about how he’s changed, and at the same time understand how my opinion of the work has evolved.
In the 1996 film, Maggie has main character energy, with secondary characters orbiting around her on set, including crew members like Zoe the costume designer (Nathalie Richard), flirting with her but reticent to make a move; industry cogs like a relentless, agenda-driven interviewer (Antoine Basler) who wants to rave about action director John Woo, whom Maggie has never worked with; and René, who is the reason why Maggie has been cast and who has a vision for the movie based on how he perceives Maggie’s work in Hong Kong, yet is plagued by family drama and a volatile artistic temperament. The narrative concludes after a partial shoot, with a potential new director and French star arriving to change the project, and the cast (minus Maggie, who has disappeared) congregating in the screening room to see René’s stylized, mental breakdown–tinged art project version of Irma Vep.
When I wrote that first essay on Irma Vep, I was responding to my fascination with genre-crossing actors working in Asia and the West and Maggie Cheung’s career in particular. But looking back now on my writing, I find it reductive and a little condescending to Cheung’s acting to have imagined she constructed the character solely from her personal experience. In the intervening years, I’ve watched more of her filmography, and I know now she’d delivered outstanding dramatic roles in Asian films I hadn’t seen or known about when I was writing in 2003. I’m now less interested in reducing an actor or director’s persona into biographical similarities and cognizant of how simplistic that reading is. I now plainly see the bias for Western cinema in our mainstream film discourse. An actor of Cheung’s caliber shouldn’t be pigeonholed as an object of fascination. Instead, I find myself focusing on the work Assayas has done to shift the focus in the series from the actor playing Irma Vep to the rest of the cast and crew, exposing more of the complexity of filmmaking itself.
Assayas gives the character of René 20-plus years of creative chops but heightens his insecurity and volatility. In the show, René is remaking his earlier, well-regarded film (presumably the new director and actor who came on to save the floundering production didn’t work out) as a prestige TV show in English but shot in and around Paris. They’re recreating the full 1915 Feuillade serial Les Vampires and have cast American-Swedish actress Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander). She joins the set following the press junket for a big-budget sci-fi film, during which she had huge personal upheaval—leaving her actor boyfriend Eamonn (Tom Sturridge) for her assistant Laurie (Adria Arjona), who in turn left Mira for the film’s director, Herman (Byron Bowers). With this project, Mira wants to do more serious acting, taking on the roles of both Irma Vep and the serial actress Musidora. Like in the 1996 movie, Assayas explores the behind-the-scenes of a shoot with an international actor out of her element but tries to twin the character Vikander plays with herself by naming her Mira instead of Alicia, takes more time to explore a host of themes from an actor’s process, and further weaves complex relationships between actors, crew, and their business partners. It’s a rich text, with fascinating conversations amongst a diverse cast, an expensive-looking production design, and an entertaining and well-constructed narrative.
This show goes beyond the initial premise of a remake or retread, to be insightful, expansive, and deeply personal. Like writing this essay does for me, the distance of time and the perspective that comes from aging allows Assayas to revisit a formative project and examine what demands to be changed. In the intervening years since writing about Irma Vep, my day job has moved from movie criticism and filmmaker interviews to building behind-the-scenes tech tools for digital publishers. Spending my days watching movies or TV and being paid to write about them wasn’t a feasible career path. Consequently, I’m now more interested in admiring how complex projects are constructed and how they fit into an artistic career for performers and crew who can still eke out a living in the biz.
Twenty years ago, it was essential to my enjoyment of the original film, and central to my essay’s argument, to understand where the fiction draws from real biography and where it diverges. Following the 1996 film, Assayas and his star Maggie Cheung were married, and she lived in Paris with him until their divorce in 2001. During this period, the films she worked on gained more prestige in the international market, including work by Wong Kar-wai (In the Mood for Love, 2046), Zhang Yimou (Hero), and Wayne Wang (Chinese Box), which all saw a wider distribution than her earlier films and focused more on intimate human drama than action. She acted in another Assayas project after their split, 2004’s Clean, which won her a Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but by the end of the decade, she had stepped back from acting, returned to living in Asia, worked on film scores, and was rarely in the public eye.
These real-life details become a plot point in the TV series, as René thinks back on his original Irma Vep and the actor he fell for while making it. He imagines the spirit of his ex-wife, Jade (played by Vivian Wu, a Chinese actress around Cheung’s age, who starred in The Joy Luck Club and The Last Emperor), who appears to watch over the production of the TV show and provide him a kind of ambiguous moral support. In the world of Irma Vep, they are estranged; and like Cheung seems to have, Jade has retired from acting. Interestingly, Assayas frequently peppers in footage from the original film in the 2022 show, particularly of Maggie dressed as Irma in the catsuit breaking into hotel rooms and spying on guests. He physically layers this on top of the new TV show images, mirroring Maggie’s and Mira's creeping through corridors and across rooftops, just as he layers footage of the original silent serial on top of footage of Vikander as Musidora. In a method acting move to get in touch with the character, Mira does the same preparation and character melding as Maggie in her black velvet Irma costume, though in this version her abilities veer into the supernatural as she moves through walls and can talk with Jade in spirit form, as well as René, and another actor, Cynthia Keng (Fala Chen).
Mira uses her encounter with the spirit of Jade to work through her guilty struggle with taking the role of an Asian actress and potential cultural appropriation—an artistic concern that likely wouldn’t have been considered in mid-'90s cinema. For her part, Vikander has warm, collegial chemistry with Macaigne’s René, whom Mira persuades to come back to set after numerous breakdowns to finish the show only he can make. They respect each other as artists, and she welcomes his characterization of Irma. Vikander has wonderful scenes as brave Musidora the working actress and Musidora embodying menacing Irma Vep, adding depth to an already layered performance. The scenes in which Mira becomes a supernatural Irma Vep lead to some of the most metatextual dialogue in the series. Assayas’s characters wrestle with their artistic process and how it relates to the mystical side to acting. René tells Mira, near the end of the shoot when she floats through the walls as Irma to convince him to finish the project, that the Irma Vep character is “a spirit who is looking for a host.” He explains Irma is a shapeshifter who reinvents herself in each generation. Assayas seems to be saying this character is about artistic evolution, about layering her essence on top of the actor and director’s own, rather than nostalgia or objectification. Like the real-life Maggie Cheung, whose portrayal of Irma Vep predicted a rise to a different echelon of projects, Mira finishes the TV series Irma Vep by closing a messy chapter of her past, ready to ascend to new artistic heights.
Twenty years on, my fascination with what I strove to describe in my original essay about Maggie Cheung’s acting remains, but with my added acknowledgment that it was not a nuanced way to think about a performance. Cheung’s version of Irma Vep still resonates with me, but hopefully in a more fully dimensional way. Assayas reveals the art-making process as personal, about himself and his stars, and thus makes my original argument in 2003—that he was making his star intentionally unknowable—simplistic. Assayas is not caught in nostalgia for that time. What makes his show about making a show so gripping is its introspection. Assayas’s new work rewards dissection because it’s engaged in the same process of infinite layering that I feel as an older film watcher who brings all her past movie consumption to the process of understanding the text of a film.