Irma Vep Recap: Three Hours Later

Where is the line drawn? A recap of ‘Hypnotic Eyes,’ episode five of the HBO miniseries, starring Alicia Vikander.

Season 1 Episode 5 Editor’s Rating4 stars ****

Photo: Carole Bethuel/HBO

Throughout the series, Irma Vep has gone back to key sequences in Les Vampires to observe how René and company interpret them for a modern version of the serial. But no episode has focused quite as intently on a section of Les Vampires than the one showcased in “Hypnotic Eyes,” which obsesses over the technique and creative battle over scenes of over-sexualized violence. The question that Assayas repeatedly implies throughout these provocative hours is: Where are the lines drawn? And who are the ones that get to do the drawing? And at what point does the erotic and seductive cross over into unsavory and dangerous fantasy? The answers are not easily sorted out.

The first big scene-within-a-scene is a shocking moment when Moreno, the evil genius played by our favorite vape-puffing crack fiend Gottfiend, kidnaps Irma Vep in a hotel hallway and drags her back to his room. He does this by wrapping a scarf around her face from behind and using it as the rope on a rucksack to put her on his back and drag her back to his room. Before the first take, René sneaks back to Gottfried’s mark and whispers directions to him: He wants the actor to “surprise” Mira in the take, though not to hurt her. There have been stories of this kind of on-set trickery before, usually involving children, from relatively innocuous ones like Steven Spielberg convincing a six-year-old Drew Barrymore that E.T. was real to draw real tears when he “dies” to more sinister examples like Robert De Niro slipping his thumb into Juliette Lewis’ mouth to intensify the most disturbing scene in Cape Fear.

Mira is having none of it. In the first take, Gottfried whips her over his back and the yelps of pain certainly sound real, given her furious reaction. “This is our first scene together, so let me be very clear,” scolds Mira. “You’re going to have to find another way to act.” For his part, René asks if she’s okay, but he’s more concerned about the scene not having the tension he was looking for. That’s always been the tunnel vision of directors who put actors in uncomfortable or even dangerous situations: They’re obsessed with getting the shot they want by whatever means necessary, and if there must be involuntary human casualties to their artistic vision, so be it. Just ask Sarah Polley about that.

Things get even stickier in a subsequent scene where Moreno hypnotizes Irma Vep in order for her to carry out an elaborate scheme. There’s an erotic component to the scene that René seeks to draw out through an agonizingly long take, and the overall effect is to take Irma Vep’s power away from her, humiliating her and turning her into a damsel in distress. The scene in the original is most popular on YouTube, according to Mira, and René speculates that it’s because it’s “the ultimate teenage fantasy.” He reckons that “boys are scared of girls, so they fantasize about taking them.” The question then becomes whether such fantasy has an entertaining charge to it, as René and Mira more or less agree it does, or whether Irma Vep’s seduction constitutes a kind of rape.

The conflict over the scene gets clouded by some unrelated on-set drama involving Robert, the older actor hired to play the Grand Vampire. Robert has been struggling to get René to pay attention to him and raising a fuss over the scene is his way of lashing out. Given his already-weak standing as director of this production — with his producer, his chief financier, and his insurer all unhappy with him — René is vulnerable to criticism that he’s overstating the sexual element of the scene and that he lacks sensitivity to gender issues. But to him, the objections are a lot of puritanical nonsense. “Shouldn’t movies get people off?” he asks.

That Mira has René’s back on the hypnotic seduction scene — which she calls strong and sexy — is probably a good indicator of where Olivier Assayas stands on it, too, which tracks with the erotic energy of the first Irma Vep and a few of his other films, too. But “Hypnotic Eyes” is perceptive about the lines that various people draw over common movie controversies, like how far a filmmaker should be allowed to go to achieve the shot they want or when a scene intended as a turn-on becomes an exploitative male fantasy. A production like René’s Irma Vep series was bound to get into a little trouble because he himself confessed to his therapist about his reason for doing it, which is more fetishistic than artistic. But plenty of great art has been created by artists indulging their kinks and obsessions.

For now, as Irma Vep the series and the Les Vampires remake head down the backstretch, the pressure to remove René as the director keeps intensifying — a lot of it due to his erratic behavior and questionable choices, sure, but some to personal motives that are out of his control. Only when his Les Vampires totally collapsed did Jean-Pierre Léaud’s René conjure his truest and greatest artistic impulses, which also resembled a kind of nervous breakdown. René is inching ever-closer to that same psychological precipice.

Outtakes

• René demanding to smoke in the car while refusing to allow his driver to open up windows or use the air conditioner is his directorial vibe in a nutshell.

• Great touch to do filmed re-creations of historical events on the production of the original Les Vampires, especially a scene near the end where Musidora kills off the actor playing the Grand Vampire. When the actor picks himself up and walks over to the director, played by René, and asks what’s next, he’s told, “Go straight to your accountant for your last paycheck.” With Robert raising a fuss on his set in the present-day, René is ready to throw away the script to do likewise.

• Mira’s romantic life is extremely unsettled and impulsive, and it inevitably results in collateral damage. She and Zoe had a moment together that meant something to Zoe, who tries to follow through on the “next time” promise Mira made to her after a fun night they had on the town together. The best Mira can do is turn her down as enigmatically as possible. “I like you,” she tells Zoe. “But this is not my world.”

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