In Personal Shopper, Kristen Stewart plays a shopper for a supermodel who’s preoccupied with the death of her twin brother from a genetic defect a few months earlier.
The effect Assayas is going for here seems closer to the strange ghostly qualities of his 2016 film Personal Shopper than the original Irma Vep, which is why there’s so much talk about “spirits” on set and more of an interest in exiting the series elegantly rather than emphatically. She then goes out and nails the choreography on her last take. When Cynthia Keng asks René if she can get out of a crowded scene so she can leave a day early, we might expect him to explode with rage, but he’s basically fine with the idea. When Gautier Parcheminerie learns that Mira didn’t turn up on his shoot for Dreamscape, he takes the news surprisingly well: They can’t lawyer up because suing a star of her caliber would be a bad look for the company, and so they’ll just have to turn the page.
Poor Gregory, the producer, winds up waiting in Mira’s hotel lobby with flowers, not knowing that she’d checked out the day before.
Gottfried was able to leave with a garden party and a raucous speech, but everyone else seems to evaporate, often without notice. That’s not how dramas are supposed to work.īut it may be how a set works. There’s no follow-up with Laurie or Herman, who don’t make an appearance at all, despite Mira’s lingering feelings for Laurie and Herman’s stint as series director ending without a peep. Regina’s feelings for Mira, which were at issue for much of the series, are not only unaddressed, but the two never cross paths in the entire episode.
But nothing comes of it, even though René’s “spies” have told him about it. There’s an entire subplot introduced about Mira zipping over to London for a super-secret morning meeting with a director and telling Zoe about it, which sets up the inevitable conflict when Mira, say, isn’t able to be found on set or when others find out who she’s meeting. One of the most striking aspects of the finale - and perhaps, I’d imagine, the most frustrating for some - is that it isn’t hugely interested in tidying up any of the messes it creates. For filmmakers, it’s usually just about looking ahead to the next thing. The actual creation of art winds up being much more meaningful than whatever afterlife it has. The process itself, this episode suggests, is what delivers the artists involved to the places they want to go. “Their lives are often extremely dull.” Given the autobiographical thrust of Irma Vep, it’s easy to imagine Olivier Assayas agreeing with these sentiments and perhaps thinking an eight-episode series destined to sit around a streaming platform like HBO Max is the dullest possible outcome. When his therapist suggests that films take on a separate life after they’re done, Rene shrugs it off. But now that it’s over, he seems uncharacteristically sanguine about the process, referring to movies as having a life of their own, a “black magic.” “You conjure them, they awaken you, and they leave you stranded,” he says wistfully. When they’d met closer to the beginning of the shoot, René was much more anxious, interrogating his own motives for wanting to revisit material that he’d turned into a movie - and a failed marriage - before and not necessarily coming up with noble artistic reasons for doing a miniseries about it. The key scene in “The Terrible Marriage,” the feather-light final episode of Irma Vep, occurs between René and his therapist, who are discussing how he feels at the end of this tumultuous shoot.