The Grand Illusion

Arthouse cinema in the 90s has seen a decisive shift away from Europe: the creative hotspots are now truly global, spanning China (Zhang Yuan), Taiwan (Hou Hsiou-hsien, Tsai Ming-Iiang), Korea (Jang Sun-woo) and Iran (Abbas Kiarostami, Moshen Makhmalbaf). But while attention has drifted East, 90s French cinema has been quietly revitalising itself with a new generation of filmmakers building on the achievements of the post-nouvelle vague. The forerunner of this new wave, Léos Carax, has been inactive since the artistic triumph/professional disaster of his 1991 film Les Amants du Pont Neuf, leaving Olivier Assayas, the writer-director of Irma Vep (1996), as the most exciting young filmmaker in new French cinema. Assayas and filmmakers like Arnaud Désplechin, Claire Denis, and Pascale Ferran share an urgent critical engagement with the rigours and impasses of contemporary life and relationships, and an acute, voluptuous sense of modernity in all its lyrical yet alienated flux.

Irma Vep, the first Assayas film to be distributed in Britain, marks a departure from his previous five. Always grounded in the harsh socio-economic reality of the here and now, his films - beginning with Désordre (Disorder, 1986), and followed by L'Enfant de l'hiver (Winter's Child, 1989) - deal with the impossibly fraught emotional entanglements of self-absorbed youth and the brutal price of self-definition in a world of casual compromise and routine exploitation. Much of this applies in Irma Vep, where we follow the misadventures of a Hong Kong actress who doesn't speak French starring in a modern remake of a classic silent film. The film shares with Assayas' earlier work a disoriented main character forced to improvise an identity, but now the protagonist does this professionally.

The silent film that is remade in Irma Vep is Les Vampires (The Vampires, 1915). The title refers to a criminal underworld gang which includes the masked female spy, Irma Vep (an anagram of 'vampire'). Louis Feuillade's film is a sacred text of early French cinema, championed particularly by the Surrealists: in 1928, Breton wrote that 'one day people will realise that there has been nothing more realistic and at the same time more poetic... in Les Vampires it will be possible to find the reality of this century'. While the notion of a commercial remake is seen in Irma Vep as both preposterous and sacrilegious, Assayas' film itself attempts to capture the true spirit of the original as an apotheosis of the rupture of modernity.

The film operates on several levels: as a satire on the film industry and its politics; as an encapsulated debate on French cinema and its struggle between the cynicism of commerce and the idealism of art; and as a meditation on the nature of film itself. Amidst all this, Assayas promiscuously mixes actual and invented film history and iconography. At their intersection, Maggie Cheung, the Hong Kong movie star who plays herself playing Irma Vep, is at once subject and object: the puzzled, well-meaning protagonist of an adventure in cinema who succeeds beyond all expectation in entering into the spirit of her assignment. Assayas' implication is that only a figure of such fabulous pop-mythic lustre as Cheung is capable of incarnating Irma Vep, a character with nearly a century's accumulated iconographic mass.

The metacinematic self-reflexivity at work in Irma Vep recalls Warhol's emulation of the Hollywood star system. Assayas has written that Warhol's work represents 'the most important and essential in American cinema'. If France epitomises a cinema of jaded sophistication and post-colonial, post-Truffaut decline, for some time now Hong Kong has represented the innocence and vitality of cinema's infancy. In its appropriation of American movie genres and star system iconography, Hong Kong has the same relation to the pre-war Hollywood studio system as Warhol's Factory. Irma Vep, like Wong Kar-wei's Chungking Express (1994) and Iranian maverick Moshen Makhmalbaf's Salaam Cinema (1995), suggests that the different strata of modern world cinema may be converging towards a real alternative to the cul-de-sac of pulverising Hollywood spectacle, itself a manifestation of fin de siècle malaise and confusion.

For all its busyness and momentum, Irma Vep is a tender reverie about cinema as intense libidinal projection. Crucially, it's Cheung-as-Vep, not Cheung, costumed in a form-fitting latex bondage outfit and mask, who personifies the capacity of the movies to materialise its own inherent imaginative eroticism. The union of two doubled figures (real life actress playing herself playing a previously-incarnated fictional character) is a kind of erotic excess that destabilises the order of filmic representation. When René, the erratic, manic-depressive director, is overcome with despair at the state of cinema - 'Just images. No soul... Images about images. It's worthless.' - Cheung counters: 'That's desire... that's what we make movies with,' reaffirming the medium's power. It's as if the dynamism and energy of New Asian cinema has been summoned to revitalise its near-exhausted Western counterpart.

In Irma Vep, as in all his prior films, the freedom and the specificity of Assayas' use and movement of the camera express this desire, but within a wider aesthetic economy defined by certain fault lines. These are most evident in the bleak, tender Paris s'éveille (Paris at Dawn, 1991) and the melancholy yet exhilarating L'Eau froide (Cold Water, 1994) which set up a tension between intense sensation and subjective abandon on the one hand and cool, unsentimental scrutiny and unsettling moral ambivalence on the other. Stylistically they are at once naturalistic and heightened, the narrative dynamics pulled between melodrama and introspection. To some degree this is the strength of much of the work from the new generation of French filmmakers.

Assayas' refined visual sense is correspondingly divergent - muscular, sensual, restless yet subdued, tense. His camera can behave with elated, unpredictable abandon as it does in his most accessible film, Cold Water, and then with subtle, insidious deliberation and rigorous precision as in his best and most demanding film, Une nouvelle vie (A New Life, 1993). Assayas rejects the application of camera movement in post-classical cinema as ersatz style - gratuitous sensationalism or kinetic diversion, impulses which dissipate its expressivity. The camera's momentum, its restless follow-movement and the use of long, dynamic continuous shots in Irma Vep catch the quicksilver shifts and acceleration of modern life, organising them into a poetics of transience, disorder and yearning. As in Cold Water, the camera renders a raw handheld documentary feel, but as often as it observes, the camera also indicates or expresses an emotion, mood or subjective state which is not visible. Often it combines the two principles into a lyrical impressionism; a style Wong Kar-wei and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle have pushed into bold, vibrant realms. The impressionism arrived at by Assayas and his director of photography Eric Gaultier is, by contrast, more contemplative and erotically charged. This is most notable in the ineffable grace of Maggie Cheung and her costume designer Zoe sharing a night-time moped-ride along the bank of the Seine, lights shimmering on water, accompanied by Ali Farka Toure's lilting guitar.

The camera style shifts most radically in what proves to be Irma Vep's pivotal scene where Maggie Cheung, dressed in her costume, succumbs to a kind of delirious rapture. This is conveyed subjectively by a stumbling, swooning, vertiginous continuous pan around the disarray of her hotel room (accompanied by Sonic Youth's Tunic), until Cheung herself lurches into frame and becomes the subject of the rest of the shot. Creeping through hallways, stealing jewellery from a hotel room and ascending to the roof to stand amidst tumultuous rain and flaring, incandescent light, she is possessed by the spirit of Irma Vep. That startling schizoid pan, which you can see in Scorsese films from time to time, indicates this by beginning in a subjective register (Cheung's POV), and abruptly shifting into an objective one (when Cheung enters the shot): in effect Cheung is seeing herself, as if in a supernatural out-of-body experience - or perhaps a bifurcation of self and icon/persona.

All of Assayas' films are ultimately haunted by loss and abandonment: either physically or psychologically, his characters dematerialise like phantoms. Maggie Cheung - René and Zoe's unattainable object of desire - is removed when René suffers a nervous breakdown and has to leave; for the film's replacement director, the role of Irma Vep must be played by a French woman. Earlier in the film we glimpse a scene from the SLON collective's Classe de lutte (1970) which is playing on a television, in which the camera pans to grafitti on a wall: 'Cinema is not magic. It is a science and a technique, a technique born of science and at the service of a will, the will of the workers to free themselves'. Acknowledging the utopian tradition of French cinema from which René hails, Assayas equates post-'68 French militant cinema's romantic idealism and ephemerality with the purity of cinema's early silent era exemplified by Les Vampires. His own utopian agenda is perhaps even more radical, yet the very opposite of a materialist demystification of film.

Another playful piece of iconic substitution occurs when the director René, played by the nouvelle vague neurotic icon Jean-Piere Léaud, is replaced by José, played by burnt out 60s counter-cinema relic Lou Castel. In Irma Vep's enigmatic coda he views René's rough-cut. It is a mesmerising, avant-garde assemblage of shuddering, disjunctive optically-printed shots of Maggie-as-Irma, the image surface disfigured and eventually obliterated by scratches and line formations in the manner of 50s Letterist filmmaker Jean Isidore Isou in such films as Venom and Eternity (1951) - another lost continent of French film history. Is this a definitive negation of the filmic image, a collapse into formless, incoherent chaos? A denial of Cheung's iconography? A cinematic expression of René and art cinema's final nervous breakdown? Maggie Cheung's possession by Irma in the hotel sequence is one more twist on the notion of cinema's shuffling and transposing of iconography - one which assumes supernatural dimensions. Perhaps Maggie is possessed less by Irma than by cinema itself. René's rough-cut certainty has the air of an invocation, a spell to conjure cinema's occult powers of disruption. (Assayas is also a great admirer of Kenneth Anger.) Irma Vep's flirtations with the uncanny and the fantastic, consonant with Les Vampires, suggest a reconciliation with an obsolete conception of movies that's inscribed in the beginnings of cinema - the magic lantern, the demonstration of film projection in magic shows, the alchemy of photosensitive chemicals - the magic of the movies.