Irma Vep
Series-Premiere Recap: Screw Up the Plan
With his original 1996 film
Irma Vep
, writer-director Olivier Assayas took a defibrillator to
the French film industry, attempting in his own puckish way to revitalize a cinema
that had grown chaotic and creatively moribund. In the film — as in
this new miniseries — an international star is brought into Paris for a remake of
Les Vampires
,
Louis Feuillade’s ten-episode silent serial about a journalist seeking to expose a secret society of underground
criminals, including Irma Vep, a diabolical woman disguised in a black catsuit.
The role of René Vidal, the director of the movie-within-the-movie, was played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, a living legend
whose role as Antoine Doinel in several François Truffaut movies, starting
with
The 400 Blows
, made him the face of the French New Wave.