If you’ve been paying attention to the press coverage of the trendy new HBO series Irma Vep, you’ve undoubtedly encountered references to its purported “meta” qualities.
This designation rests on the fact that French filmmaker Olivier Assayas’s eight-part limited series is a remake of his 1996 feature film, also titled Irma Vep, and that both iterations of the project — the present series and the past feature — center on a fictional French filmmaker who has turned his attention to remaking Louis Feuillade’s silent film serial Les Vampires, released in 1915 and 1916, which focused on a coterie of criminals, the Vampires. Thus, Assayas might be said to be holding up a mirror to a film from the 1990s that was holding up a mirror to a serial from the 1910s.
Got it? Well, of course you do. On the basis of the first three episodes in the series, we’re not talking about a work as imaginatively self-referential as, say, a piece of art by M.C. Escher or even David Lynch’s 2001 feverish fantasy of modern Hollywood, Mulholland Drive. Perhaps the balance of Irma Vep will prove pleasingly serpentine, rather than ploddingly dull, but if this is meant to be cutting-edge meta, well, then so is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It’s just another remake, this one stretched from feature length to series length without any justification other than the fact that arty series are popular these days and arty films aren’t.
Actually, Hollywood’s comic book-based blockbusters — things like the Spider-Man movies — play a big part in Assayas’s strained satire in the new Irma Vep: Substituting for the far more mysterious Maggie Cheung, who had the leading role in Assayas’s earlier film, Swedish actress Alicia Vikander stars as Mira, a leading lady from the United States whose latest movie, a comic book adaptation called Doomsday, has made something like a zillion bucks. We can see how silly Doomsday is when, early in the first episode, Mira, as played by Vikander, a brunette so cool and self-contained that even Alfred Hitchcock could love her, dons a white wig and spacesuit to pose with a couple of futuristic guns for a fashion magazine photo shoot to promote the movie. O tempora, o mores!
Wishing to expand her artistic horizons, Mira has signed up to star as Irma Vep, a femme fatale poured into a form-fitting catsuit and the head of the gang the Vampires, in director Rene Vidal’s (Vincent Macaigne) new version of Les Vampires (which, pretentious twit that he is, he insists is not a series but “a film, admittedly a bit long, divided into eight pieces” — a nice line).
Other than as an excuse for Mira to book a trip to Paris, the prospects for the project look dodgy. Mira’s agent Zelda (Carrie Brownstein) sounds positively giddy when it appears that the financing for the remake will fall through and thus enable Mira to take on the role of a female Silver Surfer in a “high-concept, feminist, lady-led superhero movie.” But Mira is making a stand for art. “Blockbusters let you make the movies you want,” mumbles Mira’s filmwise personal assistant, Regina (Devon Ross, who, with her commentary on the sociopolitical meanings of zombie movies and her well-worn copy of a book of film criticism by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, behaves like a reject from a Jim Jarmusch movie).
The trouble with this setup is not that it’s wrong — lots of movie stars want to be thought of as serious actors, including, presumably, Vikander, whose credits include both Tomb Raider and Jason Bourne as well as the considerably more serious Ex Machina and The Light Between Oceans — but that it’s all a little lame.
Irma Vep arrives 30 years after Robert Altman’s classic 1992 satire The Player, starring Tim Robbins as a stuffed shirt at a Hollywood studio whose sins include avarice, idiocy, and even murder. But Altman’s hard-won cynicism, the result of a maverick career in which he regularly offended producers and executives, gave his film the sharp snap entirely missing from Assayas’s series thus far. Seen today, the references in The Player may be dated, but its venom feels far fresher than Irma Vep’s predictable portrait of the “deep state” of contemporary moviemaking, encompassing personal assistants, website journalists, and former lovers, all of whom conform to cliches.
Are we supposed to be shocked when Mira parties one night and shows up a little less than laser-sharp the next morning? Are we supposed to cry over the state of the art when Rene shows Mira images of the silent serial The Perils of Pauline on a phone — a trailblazing cinematic achievement reduced to some pixels on a screen? Well, we’re not, and we won’t.
Maybe Assayas wasn’t even out simply to send up contemporary filmmaking. In fact, with his moody, poetic digressions, he almost surely had some other things on his mind, too. But what? Selections shown from Les Vampires look awfully pretty, and his restagings of the same scenes for Rene’s movie are executed with great care. But this is no Day for Night, Francois Truffaut’s 1973 panegyric to moviemaking. Irma Vep skips over the thrill of conjuring a made-up world and spends much of its time on the ennui, anxiety, and tedium associated with the process and the industry that supports it.
In the end, Irma Vep offers superficial satisfactions: the sight of the comely Vikander padding around in her catsuit or the ramblings of the scattered, antidepressant-addled director Rene, who gives direction while gingerly holding a bunch of grapes. But when a film or show’s value depends on it being “meta,” it sounds like so much special pleading. It amounts to an intellectual argument for liking something that in honest or visceral terms fails to entertain or engage. Perhaps Assayas’s goal was to create a series as monotonous to contemporary eyes as the original Les Vampires would likely be. Irma Vep could be read as a rumination on, as Orson Welles once described Michelangelo Antonioni’s forte, “boredom as an artistic subject,” using that subject as the medium. There’s a “meta” idea for you.
Peter Tonguette is a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
