Irma Vep

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Irma
Vep

Maggie Cheung is Irma Vep. Maggie Cheung is Irma
Vep. Playing herself as an actress starring in an ill-fated
remake of Georges Feuillade's classic silent serial Les Vampires,
Cheung is synonymous with Olivier Assayas' clever, relentlessly meta
film. Assayas' Irma Vep is a sly satire of the film industry,
and an attempt to figure out the place of French cinema in a world in
which the classic French cinema, from Feuillade to the New Wave and
beyond, seems on the verge of being forgotten or rendered irrelevant.
Assayas' film is very conscious of its cinematic lineage. Why else cast
New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud as struggling, aging director René
Vidal? Vidal is himself a former icon, a legend even, who has become
hopelessly out of touch, unsure of his art. He is remaking a very famous
film, and knows it, and maybe isn't quite sure why he's doing
it. He is the film's representative of a film industry that's growing
old and growing young at the same time: while there is precious little
room left for Vidal's arty kind of cinema, or for the old-school
politically engaged work that once defined French art and cinema, a new
generation has embraced a populist cinema of violence and action, and is
frankly suspicious of any film that doesn't cater to mass audiences. A
journalist, interviewing Cheung, tells her that Vidal is washed up, that
Jean-Claude van Damme is where it's at, Schwarzenegger is where it's
at: movies that audiences love, movies full of violence. And movies that
this same journalist excitedly justifies as being full of poetry and
"ballet" and choreography.

This is, not coincidentally, the same
rationale that Vidal uses to explain to Maggie why he hired her. He saw
her in a Chinese action movie, he says, and admired her "grace." She
simply laughs, and quietly murmurs, almost embarrassed, that all the
stunts were done by someone else; the clip that Assayas collages in at
this point, looking cheap and tawdry from a blurry VHS, makes a mockery
of Vidal's desperate search for "grace" in artistically bankrupt
commercial ploys. Cheung fares much better. Because although Maggie
Cheung is Irma Vep here, she's also Maggie Cheung, and always remains
herself in the midst of all this movie-making chaos. It's very important
to Assayas' film that Cheung is playing herself, is playing Maggie
every bit as much as she is in the short film, Man Yuk, that
Assayas made as a silent, expressionistic portrait of his actress and
muse. Cheung is at the core of Irma Vep, looking bemused and
somewhat non-plussed by all the pretensions, pettiness, and bitchiness
that goes on during the making of a movie. She is in many ways Assayas'
stand-in here, a quiet observer who's entirely foreign to this world:
she speaks no French and is thus always standing to the side, watching
these conversations without really understanding what's going on.
Assayas keeps reminding us of this by having someone in the scene
occasionally translate into English for Cheung, giving her fragments of
information, always biased by the speaker's perspective and personal
grudges. As an outsider, Maggie is free to observe from a distance, to
stay above the fray, to simply accept her role — as fetish object in
black rubber, as foreign exotic — in this weird production.

Indeed,
Cheung — the character, not the actress, to the extent that there's a
separation — begins to inhabit her role even when she's not filming. In
one of the film's most stunning sequences, Maggie returns to her hotel
room, jitters around to a massive fuzzy burst of Sonic Youth, then
ventures out into the hotel in her skintight black rubber costume. She's
become Irma, the vampire, the ghostly thief slinking through the
corridors. She sneaks into another woman's room, spying on her as she
lies in bed naked, yelling at her boyfriend over the phone, and then
Maggie spies a pile of jewels and is seized by the desire to take them.
It's all bathed in a glowing blue light, with the unreal sparkle of the
jewels calling to Maggie/Irma, demanding her attention. Afterwards, she
runs to the hotel's roof in the rain, the lights reflecting off the
sleek curves of her suit, her hair getting all slick and wet, clinging
in strands around her face, hovering like a vampire above the rain-shiny
streets of Paris. It's gorgeous, the kind of sensual moment around
which Assayas' film is built.


It's telling that Assayas has made a film
about movie-making in which he privileges a sense of reality, of the
moments that happen when the camera isn't rolling. There's a
great sequence where the costume designer Zoé (Nathalie Richard), who's
infatuated with Maggie, takes the actress to a party hosted by Mireille
(Bulle Ogier). Assayas' camera weaves through the apartment's rooms in
endless handheld takes, following conversations that drift in and out,
as the layered soundtrack captures the cacophony of multiple threads
going on at once. It's fun and funny as hell, particularly Zoé's
conversation with the gossipy, matchmaking Mireille about Maggie, or the
dance sequence where a group of girls put on Luna's cover of the Serge
Gainsbourg/Brigitte Bardot tune "Bonnie and Clyde," another nod to the
history of French culture, and its habit of appropriating cultural
tropes from elsewhere. Just as the New Wave and its aftermath
appropriated America's obsession with gangsters and crime flicks, Vidal
is appropriating Chinese kung fu pictures to provide a different
perspective on a distinctively French forebear — and Assayas, too, is
appropriating from his actress, who is used here like a sample, an icon
of foreignness and exoticism.

There is magic in this film,
cinematic magic of the kind that only shows up in films made for
"intellectuals," the word that the film's journalist uses so derisively,
as a marker of elitism and anti-populism. There's magic in the film's
celebration of its lead actress, who is radiant and exciting and who
drifts through the film with poise and strength, even adrift as she is
in a strange culture. There is magic, especially, in the final sequence,
in which Vidal's unfinished film is screened and it is revealed that he
was apparently not making the boringly faithful remake that everyone
assumed he was making. Instead, his fragmentary assemblage (and
Assayas') is a dazzling, avant-garde collage in which Cheung slinks
through a barrage of slashes, designs and white noise, scratches that
trace her form or the directionality of her intense gaze, creating a
cinema of bare essences in which shapes, impressions, movements are
everything. It's a jaw-dropping sequence that respects the past, not
absolutely, but as a foundation for the experiments and playful
reconstructions of the present. That's the spirit in which Assayas' film
is made, as well, riffing on the history of French cinema as he laments
what's been lost and celebrates the enduring possibility of a cinema
that really matters, that's really in touch with people, with emotions,
with visual beauty.