Reality Breaks in Irma Vep

The film is deceptive. The first half plays like Day for Night; it’s pleasant and witty and shot in a more realistic style. And then suddenly the movie becomes something much more surreal. This pivot takes place when Maggie comes back to her hotel room wearing her costume from the film-within-the-film. 

There’s a Sonic Youth needle drop at the beginning of this sequence, like a shot of adrenaline, that hits rather abruptly, and it’s emphasized when we see a literal Sonic Youth poster in the frame, which breaks the fourth wall. In my work, music can be a jumping-off point for thinking about the way I want my film to feel. The idea that I could possibly make a film that hits people as viscerally as certain pieces of music have hit me and stuck with me over the years is exciting. In the scene, the aggressively loud music slows everything down, the language of the film begins to change, and a shift in tone occurs. The music connotes a post-punk cool that feels like the overt intrusion of Assayas’s voice; he loves his post-punk, and so do I! This cue feels like a shot fired into the realism of the film, and we never quite recover from it. 

The camera feels so chaotic, yet it’s also controlled and tightly choreographed. The film is incredibly loose, but the blocking and the way the camera moves are so clearly preplanned, in a way that makes everything feel natural. Maggie paces around restlessly in her hotel room, and the camera is so close to her that things begin to feel claustrophobic. This is the closest we’ve been to her and her anxiety. Slowly, the film becomes more of a dreamlike character study. 

It’s worth noting that the song we hear, “Tunic (Song for Karen),” is dedicated to Karen Carpenter, and it’s about giving in to a disease (in Carpenter’s case, anorexia) while in the public spotlight. I don’t think these parallels with the film are accidental. Maggie suffers from anxiety and is a commodity in the film at a time when international film culture is being increasingly commodified. So there’s this duality between Maggie as a human being and Maggie as an object—a literal fetish object, when you think about it, because she’s dressed in leather. 

Anna Cobb, who plays Casey in We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, is an incredible performer and she was generous in giving herself to the role. We spent a lot of time working together and talking through the middle ground between who the character is and who Anna is in real life. There was a lot of improvisation on set because I wanted to write and rewrite the role around the human being rather than have the human being fit a preconceived notion of who the character is. I see this in Assayas’s film, which seems to me to be very much about emotionally understanding who his collaborator is. The film feels alive because Maggie is alive within it—both as a real individual and as a talented performer.

Great moments in cinema—or at least the ones that have moved me the most—are felt before they’re understood. I feel exhilarated when I watch something that has me thinking, I didn’t know you could do that, I didn’t know that was allowed. I’m always wanting to create those kinds of moments in my own filmmaking. That’s another reason why I love this sequence. Maggie sneaks around the hotel and steals a set of jewels from a naked French woman we’ve never met before—and won’t meet again. There’s no reasonable explanation for this; it’s purely emotional and a poetic break from reality, like going down the rabbit hole. There’s a barrage of avant-garde style, which feels like an aggressive statement about where film can go if we let it live and be alive, personal, and visceral. I like the idea of the film opening up and becoming a different, unrelated film while still feeling like it belongs to Assayas’s wider universe; in this moment, it becomes something more akin to Demonlover or Boarding Gate. Then Maggie wakes up and it’s unclear how much of what we’ve just witnessed actually happened. I think it was Fassbinder who said something like: all of a director’s films can be different, but together they add up to a personality.