'Irma Vep', the 'film' by Olivier Assayas that is already the series of the year

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In

, director

always so fond of the spirals that rush madly through mirrors, imagines the story of a theater director who, in his desire to represent a fragment of the The life of the largest city ends up reproducing the entire city itself with each and every one of its inhabitants on stage.

New York within New York to understand just a New York curb.

Indeed, to understand a second eternity is needed.

Kaufman himself, now as a novelist, reconstructs in

the story of the most surprising, vital and perfect movie ever filmed.

It would be an animated tape in

' that life counts.

So in general.

All of her.

But what is surprising, as well as relevant, is not so much the actual film shot as the almost infinite unfilmed film starring all the characters that will never appear in it, but that had to be built, incorporated into the plot and finally discarded.

All of them are the condition of possibility of what we see.

They are the

that make possible what we actually see.

And so.

Olivier Assayas says that

the eight-episode HBOMAX series directed by him and starring Alicia Vikander, is not so much a '

' (or meta-reflection) reflection on cinema, on the very series that harass us or on the audiovisual of our days, as a '

' approach to what time, lost or recovered, is doing with our lives.

That the argument is the cinema itself would come, if you will, in addition.

What matters is something else.

," says the director in a very French way.

And we believe him.

It would seem that, like the heroes of

' of Kaufman, he also devotes more effort to building everything that vanishes in the flow of time than to record what remains standing.

In order to understand what remains, it is necessary to first reconstruct each of the omissions with the greatest detail.

Again, the entire eternity for a second.

What has been achieved in '

, in effect, is a miracle that expands before the viewer's eyes until it transforms the chances of the many fictitious lives of others into one's own real life.

We have arrived.

Note:

In order not to get lost, it should be made clear that

is a '

'.

Or more precisely, a '

' of a '

'.

We explain ourselves.

The director reconstructs the homonymous film directed by himself in 1996. He changes the format (now it is a series) and, logically, the time, but everything else remains (if there is anything left).

That was a production of a filmmaker in his beginnings written in nine days and shot in just four weeks.

It told of the desire of a contemporary director to re-film the silent serial

that

shot in 1915 with the collaboration of the actress, director, writer and more

.

The protagonist was the actress

who immediately afterwards, by chance, would end up becoming a partner of Assayas himself.

This last detail is relevant.

Now, the story is told of a director who remakes in serial format the film that he shot some time ago and who recovered, in effect, that same serial without words by Feuillade.

Film of a film that is also that: image of an image, portrait of a portrait.

Now the actress is Alicia Vikander and the director is brought to life by a

who has become a more or less invented replica, more or less reliable, of Assayas himself.

But the maze does not end here.

It is not about replicating forms in mirrors but about navigating, so to speak, in the very form of time.

had much of a portrait of the crisis that he was experiencing at the time.

Through the secret society, the many doubts of an era that opened to the cataclysm of the Great War were told.

the film, made a foothold in the previous one for herself to inhabit the fracture of her moment and, for that matter, of the cinema itself.

"The achievements of the

they were already a thing of the past and we lived in epigones of epigones", comments the director. Now, the same. Again, it is the value of the image that is discussed while the much greater uncertainties of a society go through the objective , ours, walking steadily towards the abyss.

says Assayas without bothering to specify what exactly he refers to: if he talks about cinema as it seems or, as is intuited, about everything else.

The entire series plays at mixing times, images and controversies, but always with clarity, precision and taste.

Far from Assayas the old vice of circus virtuosity (although there is also one).

The viewer is invited to travel to the old and already forgotten forms of silent cinema while attending a good and healthy collection of jokes about the superhero industry that currently occupies movie theaters.

And all this while the actors themselves enter and leave the fiction that occupies them.

Vikander in the role of Mira who is also Irma Vep could very well be Vikander herself.

And Macaigne meeting the specter of Cheung is, yes, and undeniably the same Assayas.

But beyond the mirrors and mirages, what is relevant is the entire plot that is configured and grows off screen.

The space of the series is Paris from the beginning of the last century to Paris today.

And the time of the series is the time of any spectator committed to the ghost of each of his losses and his renunciations.

Ultimately, the important thing is the

'.

At one point, the labyrinth folds back on itself and the film is interrupted by fragments of another film that, in truth, are also episodes of the series that is being filmed (it does not matter if it is not fully understood).

Now what is narrated is the life of Musidora.

I mean, Musidora appears as an actress in

she appears as a character played by Vikander in the series and appears as herself in the autobiography that completes what is being shot (also played by Vikander).

Let's say that the

acquires the virtue of paroxysm or the grace of simple illness.

That or, more simply, a miracle.

In

, the definitive film that Kaufman is talking about ends up in flames.

It will be the task of the leading film critic to reconstruct it from the beginning: from what he himself saw and from what was never seen but made possible what he saw.

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