The value of the copy, the reflection, the forgery, has long been a preoccupation of modern art. One of its foundational questions, central to the assembly and analysis of so many cultural objects, is whether you can truly create the same thing twice. The obvious answer, per the ancient Greek maxim about ever-changing waters, being no, there nonetheless persists a nagging, paranoid, not-unfounded sensitivity to replication, a suspicion that new forms are old things in elaborate disguise, that there is nothing new under the sun––which is all true as well. By the time these words are published, I’ll have finished a film about this very contradiction. Not that that’s anything new.
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When Olivier Assayas first made Irma Vep in 1996, he was falling in love with his star. Maggie Cheung, at the peak of her transnational fame, played a fictional version of herself who joins up with the fictitious has-been auteur René Vidal (played by withered New Wave wunderkind Jean-Pierre Léaud) on his fool’s errand of remaking Louis Feuillade’s seminal 1915 serial Les Vampires. The production is doomed from the start by skeptical financiers and a flailing visionary circling the drain, but “Maggie” weathers the unfamiliar and the unprofessional with the bewildered affability of a seasoned pro. Never quite sure what’s expected of her in Vidal’s opaque design, she nonetheless plays Irma Vep with a preternatural––even supernatural––poise. Eventually, she channels the catsuited arch criminal off-camera as well, skulking through her hotel by night to pilfer precious jewels in a sort of lucid trance. That iconic sequence doesn’t fully dive into the uncanny, but it teases at something eternal and transferable, a photochemical spirit that persists in the performing body.
Revived and retooled in 2022 as a miniseries for HBO, Irma Vep is transfigured by time. Twenty-one years removed from the official end to Assayas and Cheung’s three-year marriage, and eighteen years from their final collaboration, Clean (2004), the show plays out in a much lower key––the excitement is gone. Unlike the kinetic, mercurial triumphs of Assayas’s heyday, the series is unhurried and unfussed, cynical and perfectly content about it. Beneath the humour and fascination, there is regret and fatigue. Ethereal, saucer-eyed Maggie is supplanted by Mira (Alicia Vikander), a hard-edged Hollywood up-and-comer pivoting to prestige from franchise fare; the production of Les Vampires was only greenlit so executives could cajole her into being ambassador for a perfume line. Vidal 2.0 (played now by Vincent Maçaigne)––far younger, far more despondent, and far more resemblant of his creator––casually admits in an early scene that he doesn’t really care about movies. “Maybe it will come back,” says a man thoroughly out of love.
This is not to say the series presents an arid vision––at least, not one beyond repair. In scaling up his production and paring down his style, Assayas trades friction for finesse; Maggie’s costume was a bondage suit, fresh from the rack of a Parisian sex shop, made of constricting latex, but Mira is comfortably cocooned in tailored velvet. Embodied by affectless performers whose emotions come seeping in on a drip feed, Irma Vep’s slinky nonchalance seems resonant with younger generations sedated by a ceaseless, insidious, ubiquitous scroll, the defining current of our times. It also holds a mirror up to the complacent elders who sold off the remnants of our culture for parts. The project, a fusion of gentle caricature and jagged ouroboros, frequently teeters toward creaky fogeyism, but Assayas, time and again and against all odds, is tragically hip. Even when he’s behind the times, he’s ahead of the curve.
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When Irma Vep premiered in 2022, it occurred to me that Assayas’s restructuring of a 100-minute feature into an 8-hour show––an apparent capitulation to the contemporary goliath of streaming––actually brought his project closer in style, spirit, and format to its serialized subject matter. A show remaking a movie about a remake of a show that is also a remake of the show they are remaking in the show. Ludicrous. I took the bait.
When I set out to pitch an essay on these perfidious echoes, I was approaching my 20th birthday. I felt directionless: baffled and lonely and stupid and afraid. I had no idea how good it could get. I fired off a mortifyingly verbose proposal to the magazine where my brilliant friend was interning. Long shot, no dice. Then I saw the call for submissions to In The Mood’s 6th issue, “Twins.” “I’d focus on different forms of violence and how they manifest in each show, their connection to the deviant eroticism in David Cronenberg’s Crash (a revealing influence on Assayas in general), the looming question of Assayas’ proximity to the material, and of course how the iconography of Irma Vep is wielded in murkily compelling (and eventually moving) ways.” Mercifully succinct. They politely passed. (They did accept my pitch for the subsequent issue, and the rest is history).
I wound up writing the piece for a publication––at the time, my only byline save for the University of Toronto’s newspaper––geared specifically toward writers with no traditional samples or experience (they very graciously agreed to anonymize my author page last year). 2300 words later, I had slaked my thirst for expression. “What does it really mean to be “faithful,” and at what point do you have to let go and have a little faith?” Jesus. I went on to describe the series as “an abstract game of cat’s cradle with Feuillade’s pulp yarn stretched, plucked, and warped into all sorts of slick, dazzling shapes over Assayas’ personal framework.” You get the picture.
It remains, on the whole, not entirely unreadable, overflowing with ideas and observations I would later learn to express with more tact. But like all of my early writing, it is impatient and overeager and gauche, bulging with indulgent clauses and clumsy metaphors—adjective slop. Consider this my attempt to do better. Take two.
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I’m not alone in wanting a second chance. Irma Vep is part of a long lineage of do-overs: Abel Gance’s J’accuse (‘19 and ‘38); Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (‘34 and ‘56); John Woo’s The Killer (‘89 and 2024); Howard Hawks’s A Song is Born (Ball of Fire, but a musical), Man’s Favourite Sport (Bringing Up Baby), El Dorado and Rio Lobo (he remade Rio Bravo twice!); Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning (I Was Born But…) and Floating Weeds (A Story of Floating Weeds); Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot Hollywood makeover for Funny Games. For painters of yore, this was child’s play. There are four versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, five of Arnold Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead, two of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks.
Perhaps for writers these are merely “drafts.” And this is all to say nothing of theatre, that most ephemeral, repeatable art form. The list goes on, the can of worms overflows.
There is an inconceivable lattice of forces behind such recreations––industrial demands, artistic movements, minute shifts in culture, taste, and sensibility–– and also a spectrum of fidelity. While many of the aforementioned filmmakers were using old frameworks as trusted scaffolding for new ideas, Haneke or Bocklin, shifting from Austria to America or from oil on canvas to oil on copper to oil on board, were working towards a refined, iterative, mastered ideal.
I cannot say the same of myself, or of Assayas. His do-over is a feint, a performance of familiar gestures that ultimately draw an alien contour.
Irma Vep was aflame with excitement as it watched an apparatus implode in its bleak, combustible denouement, and Irma Vep feels suffused with sorrow even as its characters achieve closure, enlightenment, and transcendence.
The former felt like an invocation of a better future, and the latter plays like a sentimental resignation to a disenchanting present. They run on parallel tracks in opposite directions. Take two is a wholly original beast. Not a redo, but a reset.
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At the end of the fourth episode, Maggie Cheung’s stand-in, Jade Lee (Vivian Wu), materializes in Vidal’s apartment. They begin a frank dialogue. Speaking of his current project, the dumbstruck director refers not to “Les Vampires,” as Vidal should, but to “Irma Vep.” The thin curtain between fact and fiction drops.
She asks why he’s remaking it without her, and he reminds her that she’s retired, and wouldn’t answer his emails.
“Maybe you want to be remembered forever in your prime?” suggests Vidal.
“Do you really remember me?” she challenges gently.
“I remember the good times, I remember how much we were in love, but I don’t remember the person you really were.”
“I loved you, but I’m not sure I knew you. I’m a different person.”
Of all the art forms, a film is the most like a person. It has a physical origin (digital be damned), a transient objecthood, and a metaphysical shape––a soul. Its long life contains many brief encounters, each one leaving its mark. A film is different each time you return to it.
I chose not to revisit either version of Irma Vep while writing this piece, save for the clips I cited directly. I was scared they’d be different now. Instead, I remember the good times.
To repeat is not always to remember.