Portrait in latex: Irma Vep beguiles anew on DVD

Early into production on his feature film version of Louis Feuillade’s beloved silent serial Les Vampires, René (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is already consumed by doubts. While screening rushes he sits burrowed under layers of clothes, hawk-like and festering, finally rising to leave without a word. Only when a crewmember pleads for appraisal does he offer a gut searing “It sucks!,” or however they say it sucks in French. Late that same night, following a domestic altercation sufficiently inflamed to summon the Paris gendarme, with pharmaceutically aided calmness René reassesses the project with its star Maggie (Maggie Cheung). She tries to reassure him things are going well, that the film they’re making will be fun, that it possesses real feeling. “I feel nothing,” René flatly declares with epitomic, categorical French renvoi. Only one thing can redeem the whole fiasco, he says, only one thing sustains his interest, and it’s her. Maggie Cheung. His imported Irma Vep, his muse, and the object of universal desire within his camp.

Same goes for Olivier Assayas. Drawn in by “the radiance she exuded through her beauty and sovereignty,” he made Irma Vep (1996), the filmic host for René’s doomed remake, as both a study of persona and a love letter to a genuine star—and he wrote the above quoted homage before Cheung became his wife. Such a guiding principal, a cinema of transcendent fascination with feminine image and being, aligns Irma Vep with the French New Wave and Jean-Luc Godard’s celluloid adoration of Anna Karina, and with the cinema’s earliest feats of actress-director collaborations, such as those of Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. This is very much in keeping with Assayas’ approach overall, flush as it is with the buzzy life of film sets, with its effervescent brio, with Assayas’ willingness to invoke and reinvent aspects of the movies in order to find his own voice. Irma Vep is among the most pleasurable works of cinephile cinema, and the praise Cheung offers to René’s Vampires should be applied here with the fullest vigor: its fun, and it has feeling. And it’s newly released in a handsomely packaged DVD from Zeitgeist.

Les Vampires (1915) was a delirious fantasy concerning a gang of master criminals, one of which, Irma Vep—an anagram for vampire—slips through Paris in impossibly sexy faux ninja gear. Irma Vep, by contrast, is not fantasy so much as an observational tale in which the busy banality of work, with its stops and starts, its gossip and arguments, is gradually enmeshed with film-induced fantasy. Cheung is fitted for her role in a sex shop, the latex livery so enveloping her figure that Zoé, the film’s costumer (Nathalie Richard), is already harboring her own fantasies of seducing the star. There’s something alchemical in the contact of the latex with Cheung’s flesh, to the degree where, in the film’s most strange and beguiling sequence, the actress dons her costume and begins to inhabit her character in the real world of her hotel. She infiltrates the room of a naked woman (Armenian-Canadian actress Arsinée Khanjian) embroiled in a long-distance phone call and steals a dazzlingly bejeweled necklace. The soundscape is sublime, the soft squeak of the latex folds, the tinkly icicle rattle of the necklace being swiped from the marble vanity. The imagery is curious in its selection, with Assayas darting in for close-ups of Khanjian’s painted toenails, as though the best way to emphasize such flagrant nudity is to fixate on the feet. It ends upon a rainy rooftop, with Cheung disposing of her swag in gauzy images composed like a superhero comic. And then its over, this dream or fugue or closet criminal caper—we never know for sure which—and we’re back to the business of watching a movie fall apart.

Assayas, collaborating beautifully here with cinematographer Eric Gautier, makes the twin realities of Irma Vep feel very much of a piece. His handheld camera always prowling through spaces and across faces, he is a director of unusual assurance when simply capturing people conversing, eating, drinking or goofing around, routinely ending scenes at idiosyncratic moments, such as Zoé’s donning of a dominatrix mask with zipped up orifices while attempting to exhale a lungful of smoke. Smoking itself feels like a theme here, or at least essential to the film’s irreverent lampooning of Frenchness, of sourness, petty tirades and impassioned gloom, bad attitudes played up for a good time. Despite a lovely ride on the back of Zoé’s motorbike—to the sounds of Ali Farka Touré—and her almost attending a rave, Cheung’s tour of Paris is largely limited to the confines of the French film industry, yet for us viewers it becomes a world of constant small surprises, where everyone’s there out of love for the art—but what kind of love, what kind of art, that’s something of infinitesimal and often oppositional variation.

So one final variation, then. Assayas winds things down by winding our imaginations up. Les Vampires is handed over to another director, the foreign star dismissed in favour of homegrown talent. But Cheung’s Irma lives in a sudden leap into the scratchy abstract. The last images render her both semi-obliterated and reconceived in a crazy closing collage. Fantasy is pushed back into the celluloid fantastical. Think of it as a parting gift. Or as a prompt to start the whole thing over.