Best French Film in the Last Two Decades
'Irma Vep' is a breath of fresh air and has a direct, but subtly infectious energy that I haven't felt since watching 'Breathless' (the only Godard film that was any good). It's a movie about movies (or rather, movie-making), it's about culture and capital, and most of all it's about people, their passions as well as daily lives, doing what they do, and their relationships, without any of the typical contrivance at psychologization and judgment. It doesn't pretend to be 'deep', but to say it's superficial would be simply flat out wrong. It's a movie that after watching it, you find even the world outside the movie more wonderful and beautiful as well.
With a perfect 'non-existent', often obviously improvisational (here-and-now) script, 'Irma Vep' makes you feel often you're a part of it, that you're in it (eg the party scene at Mireille's home), laughing with everyone as it goes along. How many times have we heard simply 'shooting a script' being called a 'film'? Where every word, every intonation is supposed to be a priori imbued with the utmost symbolic and metaphysical significance, where the dialog ('narrative'), literally, carries the film forward - How annoying. Thank god 'Irma Vep' isn't that. It tries to involve, or invite, the viewer in thinking, and feeling, along with it.
The handi-cam style didn't bother me at all; it felt completely natural and appropriate, rather than simply technical, or like a superimposed construct (Blaire Witch, anyone?).
The last scene (Rene's 'edit') is particularly fascinating. Rene's madness mirroring the madness of film-making, the movie business, etc? A demonstration of the director's right or sovereignty (there were certainly foreshadowings, like Markus saying earlier, 'Don't worry, Rene will grunge it up in the editing') ? Or is Assayas saying (showing), that after all is said and done, the end product is not what really matters anymore, but all that's truly left are, literally, the traces, the intensities, the exploded energies and affects that took place in and around the work? Though none of the characters were romanticized (not even Maggie - we see her struggling with anxiety, identity issues, her seeming removedness from everyone, which perhaps culminated in her stealing Arsinee Khanjian's necklace and tossing it off the building), in this act of destruction, what's left, our humanity and mortality, is affirmed. Like in the theme song 'Bonnie & Clyde', 'de tout facon ils ne pouvaient plus s'en sortir, la seule solution c'etait mourir'.
Of course a film like this will get the usual barrage of 'incoherent', 'unfocused', 'boring', 'what's The Point, The Theme, The Thesis, The Plot, The Message, The Bottom Line?' and 'i just don't get it' type of banal qualifications. All the better maybe, because, like Maggie said, wouldn't it be boring if there were just one kind of movie?