Irma Vep review: HBO’s weird but wondrous miniseries finds Alicia Vikander in magnetic form

It is at once a stinging satire of an entertainment industry so artistically bankrupt that it will spin the idea of remaking a turn-of-the-century serial as a risky creative experiment, and an existential dramedy about the artistic process itself. More meta than I could possibly explain in words, Irma Vep is basically a remake of a remake. The series is a reimagining of Assayas’ own 1996 film, starring the then astronomically popular Maggie Cheung, whom he’d go on to marry and subsequently separate from.

In the show, the filmmaker Rene Vidal is a stand-in for Assayas. Having arrived at a creative crossroads and thoroughly disappointed by just about everything, Vidal is — like Assayas — attempting, ambitiously, to relive the past. In the show, as in real life, Vidal ended up marrying the star of his Irma Vep film, but they split up some years later, like Assayas and Cheung. It was the woman’s decision on both occasions. And like Assayas, Rene Vidal has now cast an ingenue as his former wife’s replacement as he deals with unresolved issues stemming from his separation.

Alicia Vikander plays the hotshot young star Mira Harberg, who after starring in a hit superhero movie hilariously called Doomsday, decides that she can only be taken seriously as an actor if she agrees to appear in a French show directed by an acclaimed French filmmaker. Vikander, a wonderful actor who has the presence of a silent-era film star and sounds like somebody who could deliver a moving rendition of Puccini at a moment’s notice, has gamely avoided franchise fare in her career. Besides a few exceptions, of course. But she has been involved in the Hollywood machine long enough to project her own conflicted ideas about the film industry onto Mira.

In fact, every character in the show behaves almost exactly like their fictional counterpart. Vincent Macaigne deliberately plays Vidal like the sort of stereotypical pretentious French filmmaker you’d imagine tearing up a copy of Cahiers du Cinéma after reading a terrible review of one of his films in it. In his first meeting with Mira, he confesses that he has stopped watching movies because he no longer has any affection for them. For instance, Vidal understands that the forces of commerce don’t support his vision — at one point, he’s told point blank that his show was green-lit only as an elaborate ploy to get Mira to sign an endorsement deal for the studio’s umbrella corporation — but for him, it’s a matter of life and death.

In the show’s early episodes, which play like a breezy showbiz satire, Vidal’s direction on set begins to display a recurring theme. He instructs his actors to make their performances scarier, he tells the art department to make the noose around a character’s neck tighter. While filming one scene, he demands more cruelty. Vidal has clearly become unfeeling as he’s grown older, and he thinks dialling everything up to 11 is the answer. It’s worth remembering again that he’s basically a vessel for Assayas to unpack his own frustrations — with himself and his art.

The show and Mira both undergo a major transformation the moment she slips into Irma Vep’s catsuit. What was previously an eccentric portrayal of the artistic process becomes an abstract mystery about Mira’s insecurities, which are heightened when she goes on surrealistic nighttime jaunts, looking for evidence to support theories about what others think of her. She slinks around hotel rooms of her ex-lovers, eavesdropping on conversations with their partners, her ears perking up every time her name is mentioned (often dismissively). Kristen Stewart drops by in the finale for a quick cameo, reuniting with Assayas after The Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper. Her character serves as another reminder for Mira that she is, ultimately, always going to be expendable — both as an actor and a romantic life partner.

Irma Vep is at its best when it is playfully peeling the layers off its characters. The on-set sequences, however, are invariably dominated by mundanity, almost as if Assayas wants to give himself repeated reality checks for being too romantic about these things. It’s an internal battle with himself that he’s willing to lose, because either way, he wins.

Irma Vep
Director – Olivier Assayas
Cast – Alicia Vikander, Vincent Macaigne, Adria Arjona, Byron Bowers, Lars Eidinger, Tom Sturridge
Rating – 3.5/5