Irma Vep

Irma Vep is a quirky showbiz dramedy with some of the most deceptively smart writing on television, and that’s worth tuning in for.

With so much focus on the mechanics of moviemaking, the show, like the 1996 film, risks becoming too esoteric—as if Assayas were adapting François Truffaut’s Day for Night rather than riffing on a silent movie serial about a group of criminals who call themselves “The Vampires.” But the show exhibits a pleasurable lightness.

Crackling good, sometimes hilariously farcical showbiz satire. Sure, there are times when you’ll likely get lost in the weeds, but that’s kind of the point, as director Assayas is leading us through a funhouse-mirror maze filled with wonderfully chaotic and deliberately messy developments.

I don't think the director nails the social-media age the way '90s-Irma fully witnessed its own pop-culture landscape. But after the first three episodes, I've fallen for this French froth.

It ought to be too clever for its own good but, somehow, Assayas pulls it off.

It’s become a cliché, the sort Assayas would pick on in one of his films, to say that good TV rewards patience, but this show really does. Among its pleasures is the work of Vikander.

This Irma Vep is loose and intellectually loopy, broad and jokey one moment and wallowing in sad self-absorption the next. One might compare it to the current season of HBO’s Barry, only with more pretensions, which definitely isn’t a bad thing — though I’m not sure after the three episodes (out of eight total) premiering at this year’s Cannes Film Festival if Assayas has a conclusive point he wants to make, or if he’s just noodling again on an art form in perpetual transition.

This series is based on the 1996 film by Olivier Assayas, about a star and the movie she's remaking (the French silent classic, Les Vampires). Alicia Vikander takes on the lead as the American star who's not happy about her career in blockbusters or her recently-ended relationship. While there are some cool looks at the glamour of a star's life and the making of a film, the self-important dialogue drags it down. This look at art vs. commerce isn't interesting.

Cue: Character pulls a Gilles Deleuze book on cinema. Cue: Name dropping of "avant-guerre"European cinema. Cue: American actresses smoking and talking endlessly about their sex lives. Cue: Name dropping mother **** Leonard Cohen like any left-bank left-wing Parisian adolescent has done since 1968. Navel-gazing, presumptuous, verbose as in non-stop **** couldn't be any more cliché -and seemingly unaware of it-, about Parisians! This is another excruciating boring turd from an overrated French director. This time, it's Assayas. It would be laughable if it weren't symptomatic of a degenerate culture stuck in a Nietzschean "eternal return". See, anybody can do some **** name-dropping too! This is the opposite of cinema. This is pseudo-Godard without the balls of going off the tangent and his knack for experimentation. It pretends to be edgy and artistic but awes second-rate American film critics, that don't have the culture to be literary or art critics....while inflicting acoustic torture on any person who has ever seen a Tarkovsky or Bresson film (this name dropping is OP as my nephew says)