Irma Vep · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Open on the rooftop. It is night, it is raining, and Maggie Cheung — zipped into a black latex catsuit that has baffled everyone on the production — lets herself out of her hotel room and begins to prowl. She drifts down corridors, slips into a stranger's suite, lifts a handful of jewels, and climbs out into the wet dark while Sonic Youth's "Tunic" floods the track with noise-rock. For three or four minutes the comedy stops. The handheld jitter that governs the rest of the film loosens into something hypnotic, uncoupled, almost a trance. And the woman up there is no longer quite Maggie Cheung, the Hong Kong star flown to Paris to do a job, nor quite Irma Vep, the cat-burglar she has been hired to play. She is both at once, and you cannot pry them apart. Hold that image. The whole film is built to earn it.

Everything around it is a wreck, and that is the point. The production René Vidal is trying to mount — Vidal played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, the living relic of the New Wave — is broke, behind schedule, and conceptually lost. Nobody can say why a 1996 remake of a 1915 silent serial should exist. Here is the cleanest way Gilles Deleuze ever drew the old contract of cinema: in the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; perception flows into action, action resolves the situation. Irma Vep snaps that circuit. This is the crisis of the action-image — the moment Deleuze located at the hinge between classical and modern film, when characters can no longer react adequately to what they plainly see. Vidal sees his own movie dying and can only flinch, panic, and collapse; he is replaced mid-shoot. The crew perceives that something is deeply wrong and none of them can do a thing about it. The film is a sensory-motor system that has lost its motor.

What fills the vacuum is the crystal-image — Deleuze's hyalosign. A crystal forms when the actual thing and its own image, the present and its mirror, become impossible to tell apart and start exchanging places. Cheung is the seed of it. She plays "Maggie Cheung," a star bearing her real name and real filmography, summoned to incarnate a fictional heroine who herself descends from a real silent icon. Each layer reflects the others. The rooftop prowl is the crystal flashing into being — a spontaneous crystallization in which her inner absorption into the role suddenly takes over the frame and the boundary between performer and part dissolves on screen. You watch indiscernibility happen in real time.

Now turn the crystal and look into its flaw, because this is the reading that opens the film widest. What Assayas has trapped in the crystal is decomposition — an ordered, once-aristocratic world rotting quietly from within. The world is French art cinema itself: state-subsidized, reverent, aging, marking the medium's 1995 centenary with anxious self-examination. Léaud's body carries that history like a haunting; the brash journalist's tirade against effete French film, in favor of action and entertainment, is a caricature whose accusations the movie refuses to dismiss. Day for Night used the making-of frame as warm comedy. Assayas uses it as a coroner's report on a national cinema that no longer knows what it is for.

Which is why the powers of the false govern the whole texture. André Bazin grounded film's authority in its faith that the lens records the real — the unspoken contract that the camera does not lie. Irma Vep makes lying its medium. Cheung performs a forged version of herself; the documentary alertness of Éric Gautier's 16mm photographs people who are all, to some degree, playing fictions of who they are. Cheung becomes a quiet forger — Deleuze's figure of the artist who does not report a truth but fabricates one, legending herself into Irma Vep until the invention is more alive than the production paying for it.

And then the coda, where the crystal cracks. Vidal's surviving dailies turn up scratched, bleached, hand-worked into a flickering abstraction, the emulsion physically attacked. This is the cracked crystal — the fissure, the line of flight that escapes the enclosed, dying totality. The one thing that survives the dead production is the film strip treated as raw matter, defaced into something new. Cinema does not get remade here; it gets scarred into a future.

Thread the lineage and the debts are exact. From Day for Night comes the affectionate behind-the-scenes ensemble; from 8½ the blocked director whose paralysis becomes the structure; from Contempt the meta-production where art and commerce collide and a real filmmaker plays himself; from Les Vampires the literal footage being remade and Musidora's bodysuit, the iconographic source of Cheung's latex. The 400 Blows and Out 1 supply Léaud himself, cast so his aging face drags the New Wave's whole biography into the present tense of a shoot.

What did the film do to the art? It took the most self-regarding of genres, the movie about moviemaking, and made it diagnostic — a direct image of a cinema in crisis rather than a fond memoir of one. It found, in an actress crossing borders, the perfect crystal in which a culture could watch itself fail to know what it loves. It is the film that carried Assayas across borders, and it leaves you wanting to run the rooftop back, just to watch the woman and the myth refuse to separate.