‘Irma Vep’ It was not the first film by Olivier Assayas to premiere at Cannes -that honor went to ‘El agua frida’ (1994), but it was the one that made him a sensation on the international film scene; there are not a few who continue to consider it his best work. Now, more than 25 years later, the Frenchman has returned to the Croisette to present three of the eight episodes of ‘Irma Vep’, the ‘remake’ in the form of a miniseries that he has shot for HBO and that will be released on the platform on June 6. In it, Alicia Vikander picks up Maggie Cheun’s batong in the skin of the titular character, an actress at a delicate moment in her career who undertakes the shooting of a new version of ‘Les vampires’ (2016), by Louis Feuillade, and who in the process verifies how the line that separates reality and fiction begins to fade.
Although it lacks the formal and narrative originality and intrepidity of its model -at least that is what its first three hours of footage suggest-, even so, the series proposes a highly sophisticated set of mirrors. It includes not only images of the original by Feuillade and recreations of its shooting, but also some fragments of the 1996 film and narrative elements that connect it with ‘Journey to Sils Maria’ (2014), another great film about the world of cinema by Assayas; some conversations are metatextual reflections on issues such as the rise of television fiction, the rise of ‘streaming’ and the decline of the traditional cinematographic experience, and the artistic value of zombie cinema; and among his protagonists there is a character who works as an ‘alter ego’ of Assayas himself since he shares biographical data with him, including his complicated marriage with Cheung.