Irma Vep: Film in Flux

A figure situated between cultures, languages, and traditions, Cheung was born to Shanghainese parents and brought up between Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. She has a graceful and tensile presence on-screen that perfectly captures the kind of intercontinental cosmopolitanism that the nineties ushered in (whimsically, in the scene of Maggie’s first meeting with Vidal, Cheung wears a shirt printed with different national flags). This quality is something Kwan harnessed for his metafictional portrait—also about the making of a movie—of the tragic Shanghainese silent starlet Ruan Lingyu, Center Stage (1991). In Irma Vep, Assayas plies it and turns it inside out. In her performance within a performance, Cheung plays subtly varying versions of herself as she navigates networks of clashing egos, unbridled neuroses, and frayed artistic ambitions on and off set. To watch her share a screen with Léaud is to witness the thrilling collision of two formidable cinematic galaxies, a phenomenon that only Assayas could have presented with such concurrent virtuosity and offhandedness. Gradually, the filmmaker deconstructs the role of the performer, exposing the layers that form a person’s identity and the representation thereof and showing how external experience and interiority can coalesce within a performance. Assayas’s deep-dive inquiry into the essence of acting and dissections of on-screen personae in Irma Vep—of the interchangeability between masks and faces—found new iterations almost a decade later with Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria, and with Stewart in Personal Shopper.

“The black catsuit’s allure is twofold: it exaggerates a body’s feminine contours and simultaneously veils that body so it appears as negative space.”

The complex portrait of Maggie that Assayas puts forth is further obscured and revealed in different measures by her sleek catsuit. The character’s exoticism occasionally gets conflated by other characters with that of her costume: when she is taken to a dinner party by Zoé, the hostess, Mireille (played by Bulle Ogier, who was extraordinary in her own, Karl Lagerfeld–designed catsuit in 1976’s Maîtresse), and Zoé spend a long time speculating about whether the star likes women, how she must feel in the suit, and what will happen to it after the film. Throughout the history of cinema, the black catsuit has been the seductive attire of choice for heroines inhabiting typically male-dominated genres, from Les vampires to Howard Hawks’s Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964), with its Edith Head–made scuba suits, to The Matrix (1999) and the endless X-Men adaptations. Even Assayas himself revives it in his Y2K doomsday thriller demonlover. The getup’s allure is twofold: it exaggerates a body’s feminine contours and simultaneously veils that body so it appears as negative space. For observers, it makes the wearer into an object of elusive desire, but for the wearer, it can function as armor, a rare tool of agency and transgression. At first in Irma Vep, the catsuit emphasizes Maggie’s foreignness, but the more she wears it, the more it helps her gain control within her new environment and role. Later, in a scene that brilliantly commingles the film’s different layers of fiction and nonfiction, Maggie, taking Vidal’s advice to be herself, transforms herself into a real-life modern-day Irma Vep by putting on her catsuit and staging a Rififi-like jewel heist, absconding onto the rooftop of her hotel with an American tourist’s necklace.

In the vein of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1970), Irma Vep exposes the tangled messiness of humanity behind the acting, directing, and filming processes. But it also explores the more subjective, intangible aspects of filmmaking. As Maggie and Vidal together watch Cheung’s performance as a postapocalyptic bounty hunter in The Heroic Trio (1993), as well as Musidora’s in Les vampires, on VHS tapes, Vidal tries to tell Maggie through their language barrier, in his accented English, why he sees her as the only one for the role (“You ’ave ze grâce!”). Later on, they have an emotional discussion about the elusiveness of inspiration and desire and the difficulties of translating these qualities to the screen. Although he’s commonly dismissed as an ill-tempered has-been by colleagues, Vidal’s crudeness and insanity seem to arise from an unmediated creative drive. He speaks with complete conviction of his uncompromising artistic agenda, and his worldview is a surprisingly optimistic one: in contrast to the naysayers on his set, he views Maggie’s otherness as a way to challenge assumed cultural limitations—something to unpack through his film rather than to shut out of it.

Over the past twenty-five years, Assayas’s varied filmography and experimental spirit have proffered an indelible assortment of galaxy-brained imagery, from Kim Gordon suddenly appearing and speaking Cantonese at the end of Boarding Gate (2007), to Binoche browsing Google images of celebrities on her iPad in Sils Maria, to Stewart texting with a ghost in Personal Shopper. Together, such scenes form an inventory of a new sort of visual grammar, descriptive of the world in moments of disjuncture and disorientation, when reality seems to be reshuffling itself. In Irma Vep, the sight of Léaud’s Vidal taking satisfying gulps from a liter bottle of Coca-Cola on his set calls to mind Léaud exactly three decades earlier in Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin féminin, a film that deals with the changing attitudes of a young generation—“the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”—inundated by the rise of Cold War–era Americanism in France. It’s a haunting instance of déjà vu that harks back to revolutionary strategies of the past and signals ahead to the looming uncertainties of an economically globalized but culturally fragmented future.

In 1951, Isidore Isou, founder of the lettrist movement, carried his film Venom and Eternity uninvited to the Cannes Film Festival, where he sought to actively antagonize an unsuspecting audience. He hoped the bleached and scratched-out images and caustic soundtrack would leave watchers “torn asunder by the disjunction of word and image.” In the wake of the tumultuous events that led up to May 1968, the lettrists and situationists cautioned against a future in which social relations between people would be supplanted by the passive fetishization of commodities and spectacle for spectacle’s sake—a warning that probably warrants repeating today. But through their sometimes shocking, sometimes playful modes of intervention into quotidian reality, they also proposed that new artistic languages could bring about a reordering of human existence, anchored in authentic social relationships, not ones mediated by consumer culture. Transposing theory into action and manifesting concept into object, their methods of revolt took unpredictable forms: for example, in 1959, situationists Asger Jorn and Guy Debord put out a book entitled Mémoires that was bound by a cover of heavy sandpaper, so that it would “attack” any book next to it. This unruly spirit was taken up by punk rockers and no wavers, and later by Assayas via Vidal’s parting images: in the end, Irma Vep confronts its viewers with a self-abjuring assemblage made from discarded black-and-white footage of Cheung in the title role, mutilated by scratches and stamps to the point of abstraction. It’s a striking turn that, like Venom and Eternity, shows a new kind of creation that is double-edged, animated by a desire to grasp at new epiphanies, and by the destruction and annihilation of existing forms of representation. A line from Venom might aptly describe Assayas’s and Vidal’s intentions here: “I’ll smite the picture with sun rays. I’ll take old stock shots and scratch them; I’ll claw at them so that unknown beauty sees the light of day.”