Viva the vamp! Shots in the dark - remake of film 'Les Vampires'

Interview, May, 1997 by Graham Fuller

I picked it up at a flea market a few years ago: a French postcard showing a slender young woman decked out in a sheer bat costume, her huge, lilacy-black webbed wings spreadeagled against a blank background. But she is the least threatening of vamps - vapidly blonde, passive, a little droopy. The back of the card is datelined "Arras le 16 Dec 1916" and is covered by a neat, unblemished, but mostly indecipherable script. A man called Raymond sent it to his girl - "Mon amour" - and he seems to be thanking her for a handkerchief she'd embroidered for him and sent three days before. He was probably a soldier. The card is not addressed, stamped, or franked. It could have been sent in an envelope, or not sent at all. Raymond wrote the card some miles north of the ongoing carnage at Verdun, but . . . the trail peters out.

Five months earlier, the final part of Louis Feuillade's ten-part, nine-hour Les Vampires had been released in France. A succes de scandale since it began rolling out in 1915, this groundbreaking serial, visionary in its hallucinatory naturalism and still exciting to watch today, isn't a Dracula movie but a thriller about a gang of archcriminals preying on the decadent Parisian bourgeoisie. As Irma Vep (anagram for "vampire"), the serial's slinky, black-sheathed anti-heroine and great aunt of Catwoman, the actress Musidora became a star - France's answer to Theda Bara, whose emergence as American cinema's kohl-eyed vamp extraordinaire also dates from 1915.

Maybe Raymond and his girl had seen and liked Les Vampires, or maybe the postcard was the only one he could find. Its image wasn't uncommon at the time, nor was the vamp craze an accident. In the early years of the century, the confluence of social Darwinism, biology. and evolutionary psychology led to the widespread demonization of women as vampires hatefully draining men of their life-giving essence - an idea that not only fuels our own modern misogyny but, argues Bram Dijkstra in Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (Knopf, 1996), gradually coalesced with racism to cause the Nazi genocide.

I dug out my postcard recently, having seen Olivier Assayas's film Irma Vep, a delicious verite satire that, by way of paying homage to Les Vampires, punctures the pomposity of current French moviemaking. Jean-Pierre Leaud, looking ever more like Francois Truffaut, plays the fragile director, Rene Vidal, who has hired the Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung - playing herself - to portray Irma Vep in his reluctant remake of Les Vampires; Nathalle Richard is the chainsmoking wardrobe woman, Zoe, who, while crushing Maggie into a black latex catsuit and hood, develops a crush on her; Bulle Ogler, the leather-clad dominatrix in Barbet Schroeder's Maitresse (1976), has a cameo as a meddlesome woman who contends "Feuillade's a drag."

Neither Assayas nor Vidal think Feuillade's a drag, or that Irma Vep is a monster. While the members of Vidal's crew and production staff bully and torment each other, he gently describes to Maggie the "mystery, beauty, and strength of Musidora," and explains that he wants his movie to be "very simple and magic." He also tells her that he cast her because he desires her - that's all right, she says, it's acceptable. Her understanding of that desire is the most moving thing in the film; it connotes the unspoken complicity between actress and director, the knowledge that he can ravish her but not touch her if he wants the film to work. But the idea spins her off into a nocturnal adventure in her hotel, where, dressed in the latex fetishwear, she experimentally burgles a naked woman's room - as sexy and disorienting an interlude as anything in Les Vampires.

Soon after, Vidal is replaced by a rival director, Jose Murano (Lou Castel), who replaces Maggie with an opportunistic French (Aryan) extra. "Les Vampires isn't Fu Manchu, right?" protests Murano. This raises the specter of Maggie as the seductive Eurasian vampire woman of the kind who, says Dijkstra, surrounded the novelist Sax Rohmer's "Yellow Peril" archvillain: ". . . the evil issue of unholy liaisons between degenerate 'oriental' men and vulgar white women. . . . a 'half-savage,' a 'mongrel,' who must be whipped into submission. The male must take the phallus of primitive sexuality from her with whatever force necessary, and if there is any decency left in her, she will thank him for it."

Intentionally or not, Irma Vep says there's something wrong with this picture, just as there's something incongruous about my postcard and its vagina den-tata-less vamp. Maggie is the only person in Irma Vep who doesn't have a selfish agenda. Her dignity, loyalty, and discretion contrast with the rampant egoism of everyone around her. She's a friend, not a sperm-hungry spider or even a ball-busting bitch. Her presence exposes the predatoriness and corruption in society - represented by the commercially driven, intellectually bankrupt French filmmaking community - just as Musidora did in Feuillade's far-sighted serial. The femme fatale was always a projection of other people's paranoia and dread. By taking the fatale away from the femme, Assayas's brilliant, trenchant, funny little movie upsets a very big apple cart indeed.