Irma Vep

Olivier Assayas's TV series – a new take on the ideas that drove his own 1996 film of the same name – is a glorious, gluttonous delight.

Mira worries she won’t live up to the part of Irma Vep, inhabited as it has been by two such genuinely iconic actresses (it’s an overused term, but it applies here). The film, among other things a reflection on the place of French cinema in a global marketplace, combined Gallic cinephilia with a slick, postmodern aesthetic influenced in no small part by the Hong Kong action cinema that was dominating cinemas at the time. This is Assayas’s second version of Irma Vep. The first, a 97-minute feature, was released in 1996, and starred Maggie Cheung – arguably the hottest actress in the world at that moment – as herself. Vidal has a history of erratic behaviour, depression and violence towards his male cast members, and the production is constantly under threat of being shut down. Her new assistant, film school graduate and Deleuze fan Regina (Devon Ross), is thrilled by her turn to the indie art scene; her venal agent Zelda (Carrie Brownstein) is horrified. The seemingly straightforward costume swap is symbolic of so many of Assayas’s interests: with Hollywood and Europe, spectacle and substance, film’s past and future, and the boundless other contradictions embodied by its female stars.

The actor tells Dazed about her role in the A24/HBO adaptation of Olivier Assayas's 1996 film of the same name – a sly, supernatural comedy that outdoes ...

In interviews, Assayas confirmed that Jade was offered to Cheung, and that Cheung approved the dialogue. It isn’t even for the Letterboxd crowd – Letterboxd is for film, not TV. René, too, frets that his eight-hour script simply stems from a fetish for dressing gorgeous women in bondage gear. Mira’s always wearing new Louis Vitton, but Regina’s just a normal girl with band t-shirts.” So was Mira’s Metallica top stolen from Regina? “That’s up to your imagination!” The original Irma Vep was written in nine days and shot in four weeks. “Sometimes I’d come to set in my own clothes, and he’d say, ‘Wear that.’” Mira, it’s revealed, has a history of sexual powerplay games with her female assistants, a pattern that continues with Regina. When showering, Mira leaves the door open, daring Regina to spy on her; in a later episode, Mira uses magical powers to glide through a wall (it’s a wild show) to gaze at Regina in bed. Which is great.” The freedom extended to outfits. “Regina isn’t afraid to say her opinion, even though she’s just an assistant,” says Ross, 23, on a video call from her home in London, in front of a wall of vinyl records. To quote Paul Schrader on Facebook: “Irma Vep is the entertainment highlight of my week.” As the involvement of A24 and HBO suggests (Sam Levinson and Jeremy O. Harris are executive producers – Ross claims not to know their input), there’s a tinge of Euphoria to the theatrics. On her IMDb page, she has three other credits: two shorts her mother’s friend cast her in as a child, and a false entry she’s unsure how to remove. Devon Ross plays the smartest character on the smartest, most confusing show on TV. Irma Vep, an eight-part A24/HBO miniseries written and directed by Olivier Assayas, is an adaptation of Assayas’s 1996 film of the same name.

She left her superstar male lover for her female assistant Laurie (Adria Arjona), only to see Laurie marry the man who helmed her last superhero blockbuster.

At one point René tells his therapist he had formative fantasies about Diana Rigg’s jumpsuited Emma Peel in The Avengers. There’s a hint in the first episode that the outfit somehow possesses Mira, and it becomes a focus for the erotic mindgames the glossy Laurie plays with her. On another, it’s a testament to the tendency of culture to eat itself. On one level, Olivier Assayas’s HBO show, shot in a mix of English and French in Paris, is a workplace comedy with all the romantic complication and in-jokey industry stories of Call My Agent, but with smaller laughs, loftier narrative aims and without a climax tying up each episode.

The Oscar-winner stars as a velvet-catsuited villainess in this series about a film about a series of films – but while it may be headspinningly meta, ...

So Assayas has made a TV remake of his own film, which was about making a remake of the 1915 original, with a director (named René Vidal in both) who is based on Assayas himself. Mira wants to be taken seriously, even if her agent is trying to get her to cash in and become the female Silver Surfer. René, the struggling auteur, is determined to stay true to Feuillade’s vision, but the cosmetics corporation financing the project is more interested in making Mira the new face of their perfume brand. Mira’s character in the arthouse remake is Irma Vep, a velvet-catsuited villainess and part of the criminal gang known as the Vampires – “pure evil but in a sexy kind of way”, as René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), the director, explains to her. Here, René also made an earlier Irma Vep film and married its star, as did Assayas, who married the actor Maggie Cheung, who played Vep in his 1996 film. Something worthy and arty and European – a remake of the (real) 1915 Louis Feuillade serial, Les Vampires.

This reimagining of Olivier Assayas's 1996 film of the same name is a sharp and witty take on the state of modern cinema.

This is a charming world populated by enviably chic women and endearingly hapless men. What begins as a gossipy, Call My Agent!-esque showbiz satire – all cynical execs, flustered lackeys and diva-ish luvvies – gradually morphs into something more philosophical about the relationship between fact and fiction, reality and dreams, life and art. Action flits between the silent original, the contemporary film-within-a-film and the making of both. As the deliriously audacious series unfolds, the auteur and his muse develop a lovely bond. Oscar-winning Swedish actress Alicia Vikander is mesmerising as Mira Harberg, a Hollywood star disillusioned by both the superhero blockbusters that made her name and tabloid coverage of her recent relationship split. The remake’s neurotic director, René Vidal (scene-stealer Vincent Macaigne), is a tantrum-prone misanthrope who, we slowly learn, is haunted by his heartbreaking past.