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.

From fettered youth to youthful folly: two by François Truffaut

We have so few portraits of innocence like that of Antoine Doniel, who in his inarticulate stare alone combined undigested emotional damage with a spirited will toward childish anarchy that no amount of stern punishment seems able to fully repress. With his neglectful parents, impatient teachers and paucity of friends, he’s essentially alone in the movie, receiving lasting consolation only from the camera, or mise-en-scène if you prefer, itself, which fixed so memorably, so dazzlingly, on his physiognomy in that famous final shot, freezing the child in time just as he wades out to sea, escaping from the accumulation of bad turns alluded to in the film’s marquee-ready title. He’s played by the remarkable Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got the part by answering an ad in the paper. He was 14 at the time, pretty young to make this kind of impression, but his director trumped him—he was only 27.

One of a remarkable triumvirate of movies that gave birth to the French New Wave, The 400 Blows (1959), the autobiographical feature debut of critic-turned-filmmaker François Truffaut, is creeping up on its 50th birthday, yet it possesses a freshness and sense of freedom that still radiates from the screen. The sentimentality that clung to certain later Truffaut's can be sniffed out—Jean Constantin’s lovely music emphasizes this—but here it feels appropriate. The experiences addressed are raw enough to render the movie nimble, and frequently fun. We root for the preservation of Antoine’s delinquency. We watch him pass through his rituals of truancy and mis-education, of familial obligation and alienation, of developing awareness of adult unhappiness and dread, and Rebel Without a Cause (55) seems like it must have been from another age, or maybe it would have felt more palpably real if they’d shaved a decade off its lead. Maybe the French simply knew how to get at a brutishness in youth that Hollywood naturally molded into melodrama. Brilliant melodrama, but melodrama nonetheless. 

I saw both The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim (62), Truffaut’s third feature, when I was around 20. The former meant everything to me, while the latter struck me as more kooky or historically important than truly moving. When I see the films now my response is almost the reverse, with the former playing as still affecting if relatively less startling, and the latter revealing more depth and wisdom than its formal exuberance and inspired artifice initially promised. Both hit Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend in a Truffaut double-bill, so I guess comparison is inevitable, even between such heights. There’s a scene in Jules and Jim where the three central characters traipse through the wilderness playing a game which has them searching for the last signs of civilization. If given the choice between finding a copy of The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim to carry with me through some post-civilized world, I’d have to go with Jules and Jim.

The source material comes from Henri-Pierre Roché, whose artistic flowering occurred at the opposite end of adulthood from Truffaut’s—he was 73 when he wrote Jules and Jim, his first novel. Like Truffaut’s first film, Roché’s debut was autobiographical, but its telescopic perspective, looking 50 years into the past, laces the events with a heady mix of vitality and nostalgia, partially because its able to regard suffering with sheer admiration for youthful folly. The story, which begins on the cusp of World War I, is only partly about the titular characters. Jules (Oskar Werner), a German, and Jim (Henri Serre), a Frenchman, meet and become nearly instant friends, inseparable, even dressing alike, forming something like a platonic marriage. They meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau, whose extraordinary beauty was complicated by the darkness around her eyes that made her never seem exactly young), who enters the movie as a sort of magical creature, the living embodiment of an ancient sculpture the friends both adored. On their first afternoon adventure with Catherine she dresses in drag and Jim draws a moustache on her face. It is clear from the start who’ll wear the pants in this threesome.

Years later, after the friends fight on opposing sides in the war, Jules will marry Catherine and move to the country, while Jim tries to maintain an ostensibly bohemian bachelorhood. But the friends need to share everything, and when Catherine’s instability comes to wreak havoc on Jules’ quiet life the time comes for the romance between Catherine and Jim that always seemed inevitable. For a time the three live in uneasy harmony, in a house with many bedrooms and a daughter who takes her abundance of parents in stride. The actors are so beautifully cast that they make this chaotic equation, a prelude to the sexual inhibitions to come later in the decade, feel utterly natural. The movie is partly about Moreau’s siren-like, enigmatic allure, which it never dares to penetrate, and in fact needn’t. But it’s just as dependent on the friends’ unnerving sense of individual completion only through merging, something so well conveyed that by the time Jules it left alone in the world it’s impossible to imagine how he’ll go on. Maybe that’s why the movie ends so abruptly.

Truffaut’s recklessly inventive approach was a masterstroke. With a deliriously fragmentary editing strategy he careens through the story’s lengthy chronology at a galloping pace, while making constant stops to revel in epiphanies. He makes a clamorous parade of Thérèse (Marie Dubois) playing “steam engine” with her cigarette. He lets us luxuriate for the entirety of the song performed by Moreau and Boris Bassiak. He takes the reception of a letter as an opportunity to stage a strange, dreamlike sequence where Moreau’s face appears in the centre of a sweeping shot of a passing rural landscape. And he cuts through the frenetic with a voice-over that, juxtaposed against moments of stillness, reminds us how uncontainable the past can seem. In some ways it’s even more youthful and undisciplined than The 400 Blows, but its dizzying detours are so elegantly of a piece, a full expression of a very particular method of storytelling that makes a whipped-up jazz of life and finds an emotional truth in the very blur of things. It stops you in your tracks, hoists you up on the ride and sends you over the edge before you’ve caught your breath. A treasure.