Irma Vep (1996)

Written and directed by Olivier Assayas

Metatextual movies about the filmmaking process run every chance of being self-indulgent belly button lint, because there always seems to be the suggestion from filmmakers that their chosen profession has more interesting tales of dysfunction than other industries. 

They could be right, of course. Filmmaking straddles that line between mass-media commercialization and art, employing sometimes 1000s of people to express one person’s singular vision, but by making movies that are as much about the process than the story, it’s easy to fall prey to self-importance. 

Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas’ movie about a whirlwind and ill-fated production of Irma Vep, does not. Instead, it’s like a speeding bullet, a runaway train, a piano falling out a window or whatever else you can think of to describe the sensation of feeling the impact before you have time to process much else. 

It’s stressful. Irma Vep opens with a long, twirling take inside a production office where a dozen tasks are being done at once, and no one person gets more than five seconds to concentrate before they’re interrupted by someone else. Casting, logistics, transportation, rental agreements, props, financing – a million details are being hammered out simultaneously with shouts, insistent intrusions, accusatory tones, exasperated sighs filling the air. Standing still in the maelstrom is the movie’s star, Maggie Cheung, playing herself, fresh off a 12-hour flight, waiting to meet the director. He’s not there. Someone forgot to tell her. 

Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Vidal, the director in question. A prominent artist whose prominence in old age is up for debate, most of all by his crew, who nonetheless set to work because bills need to be paid. They take their frustrations out on each other. Vibes are bad, but there’s plenty to laugh at in this comedy of bad manners where Maggie Cheung displays the patience of a saint as she tries to make sense of Vidal’s mumblings, field questions from a French journalist who insists “artsy” movies like the one she’s in has no relevance anymore, or remain neutral in an inter-crew spat where one producer’s trying to dig up evidence of another crew member’s drug dealing.    

Taken together, Irma Vep resembles a dysfunctional family dinner. A fitful, enigmatic patriarch at the head of the table, a besieged oldest sibling to his right, a fiery younger sister seated at the far end, a controlling middlechild casting glances every which way, and Cheung as the unfortunate guest of honor, our proxy as the outsider to all this. Within the animosity, a vein of affection borne through common suffering appears, however, with the crew made all the more tight-knit in their shared experience.  

Irma Vep wants more for (fictional) Maggie Cheung, but it wants to also remain respectful of (real) Maggie Cheung. A subplot of her descent into artistic dissociation as she tries to get to grips with her role of the protagonist has its moments, but feels like a sideact to the real circus that is the movie’s meta-text. Something akin to a sizzling distraction from the kitchen sink dramedy happening around her. 

The production is the story here, and it’s a mostly protagonist-less affair, which should spell disaster, but it’s saved by the many human interactions, good and bad, that define it. The success, or chaos, of the fictional production of Irma Vep is expressed in the feelings of envy, anger, compassion, loneliness, fear, arrogance that exist within this microcosm, and while Assayas’ movie is a broadside to an industry he obviously both hates and adores, the rings in the water spread to cover us all.