For a show as deliriously playful as "Irma Vep," the HBO limited series created, written and directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, its deepest truths are often the most bluntly spoken. One speaker is Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander), a Hollywood star who's playing the Parisian jewel thief Irma Vep in a remake of "Les Vampires," Louis Feuillade's 1915 crime serial. Enjoying a free moment with another actor, Cynthia (Fala Chen), Mira quietly extols the power of cinema and laments its growing obsolescence in a content-saturated era: "Movies are a portal to some sort of spiritual world we don't have access to anymore," she says. "We've lost our faith."
Later in the same episode, Mira's raucous German co-star, Gottfried (Lars Eidinger), will celebrate his last day of shooting by spraying the crew with Champagne and destroying a few pieces of furniture, part of a life of hedonistic risk tied to his ride-or-die belief in the movies: "Cinema was the wild West. Why are we making movies now?" he rants. "Who's willing to put their life on the line for movies? We live in boring, dark, dull times. Where is the sense of adventure? Where's the mayhem? Where's the chaos?"
Now, it's entirely possible that Gottfried, a cocaine addict who has a close brush with death mid-production, simply hasn't been paying attention. From day one, mayhem and chaos have been this production's only real constants. The wildly neurotic director, René Vidal (Vincent Macaigne), has a bad habit of verbally and sometimes physically attacking his actors. Those actors (they include Vincent Lacoste and Hippolyte Girardot), struggling to accommodate their egos within the parameters of an early 20th century text, constantly question their characters' motivations while refusing to examine their own.
