Irma Man and Repo Vep

What happens when two unrelated films meet cute?

I recently watched two movies. On the surface they had little in common. But one morning soon afterward I lay in bed, my imagination jumbled by fresh unconsciousness, and wondered if maybe they weren’t as different as they seemed at first - that, in fact, they were drawing from the same well of discontent about purpose under capitalism, which they conveyed through strikingly similar narrative tropes. 

Was I onto something - or was I full of shit? You be the judge!

The first movie was Irma Vep, a meta-cinematic French bauble from 1996, directed by the celebrated auteur Olivier Assayas, which we saw at MoMA on Hope’s birthday. The film stars Maggie Cheung as a fictional version of herself, a Hong Kong actress flown to Paris to star as a jewel thief in a remake of the iconic 1915 crime serial Les Vampires. The storytelling is fashionably oblique, with scenes that dance around narrative expectation in the style of Godard and his Nouvelle Vague compatriots. 

The second film was Alex Cox’s 1984 Repo Man, a punk-spiked cult comedy that we watched on DVD at home the next night. Starring a very young Emilio Estevez as a disaffected youth who falls into a job repossessing cars, the film’s tone is blunt-force satire, with a plot that revolves around a Chevy Malibu with a trunk full of lethal alien corpses. Its antecedents are B-movie sci-fi and nihilist counterculture comedy. 

Despite their disparate costuming, the films share a central theme, which flows through some strikingly similar storytelling channels. Irma Vep and Repo Man are both concerned with the concept of vocation - in other words, the meaning we invest in the activities necessary to survive in a capitalist world. How far are we willing to go when we interpret our job as a calling? When we “do what we love,” how sustainable is both the doing and the loving? Is it possible to be more as a person than simply the work we do? 

Both films ask these question under an atmosphere of pervasive depression. This is right on the surface in Repo Man, which skulks through the scummy back alleys of Los Angeles, past stores that stock little more than white cans with black labels that read simply “Food.” The American dream has curdled and begun to stink - there’s nowhere to go and nothing to believe, unless you’re into televangelists who siphon the life savings from gullible, brainwashed families. 

By contrast, the Parisian film industry of Irma Vep feels positively plush - for better or worse, the people there are making a living telling stories. But nearly every character talks about how much better things used to be - their films used to have cultural relevance, but now they’re just running on the fumes of past glory. For all their bourgeois comforts, everyone is discontent, haunted by personal and professional demons that threaten to derail anything they create. 

Into these two environments - a dozen years and a hemisphere apart - step transformative outsiders who invest their surroundings with new vitality. Estevez’s Otto is shiftily recruited into the repo business through a grifter’s instinctive lie, and, despite a moment of revulsion, he discovers he’s a natural. Likewise, Maggie Cheung strikes off for a risky new adventure beyond the flashy action flicks that made her famous. Both characters are revealed as thrill-seekers, who embrace their dangerous roles - as an auto repossessor and as an actress portraying a daredevil cat burglar - with the verve that accompanies a successful marriage of skill and ambition. After initial stumbles, they find themselves taking to their work with hungry pleasure. 

The roles that Otto and Maggie take on are both defined by a form of appropriation - taking something from someone who doesn’t deserve it. Class solidarity biases Otto against repossession until he learns that the excitement of the hunt - and the fact that plenty of deadbeats are assholes - outweighs any potential regrets. Piercing through Maggie’s cover job as an actress, a central (dream?) sequence of Irma Vep shows her blurring the boundaries of reality in by committing a daring theft while off the clock. Both characters upend the system by taking something that’s not theirs, providing an adrenaline spike that resonates across the films.

Furthermore, Otto and Maggie both are guided on their unorthodox paths by craggy, gnomic mentors who have dedicated their lives to the craft. Harry Dean Stanton plays the repo veteran who recruits Otto, while Jean-Pierre Leaud is the director who casts Maggie in his film. (The two actors’ beaten, heavy-browed faces even look alike; they could be brothers.) Both take great risks and fight skeptics to bring these new talents into the fold - and both, ultimately, are crippled by their devotion to their careers. Bitter, uncompromising, and deeply troubled, they show our protagonists the toll that their singular focus has taken. 

On a parallel path, both films introduce potential romantic partners for their leads, feinting at love plots that first raise and then dash expectations. Though these characters provide essential knowledge and support, the relationships flounder as the would-be love interests are exposed as little more than stepping stones to Otto and Maggie’s unique destinies. 

Those respective destinies are climactically fulfilled, in both cases, by left-field visual tours de force, engineered by their dying mentors, that allow the characters to surpass their circumstances on surreal notes of transcendence. Otto and Maggie move past the limitations of their respective systems to disappear into the ether of new experience - raptured away into the unknown, having taken everything they can from the dying worlds that briefly adopted them. 

It’s a dream that many of us share - to enter an exciting new world, make a unique stamp on it, and then surpass it. Both Repo Man and Irma Vep ultimately acknowledge that a mere job is never enough - true satisfaction and adventure take place not within the system, but beyond it. This is a personal, philosophical, even occult journey into the self, which can only ultimately continue off-camera. Vocation, occupation, career, even relationships with others - these are only the temporary vessels of true knowledge, moment-to-moment opportunities to navigate the possible. No individual circumstance is the answer - it’s that insatiable curiosity, the desire to continue seeking past the limits of what you’re offered, that provides these characters with their true, aspirational vitality. 

Of course, 90% of what I’m describing here falls into the traditional narrative of the hero’s journey. It’s possible that I could have tossed around in bed on a Sunday morning conducting this exercise with ANY two films. Everything I’ve written has been cherry-picked to fit my thesis - there are plenty of important details I’m neglecting to mention. (Significantly, Maggie’s denouement is partly the result of racial bigotry, while Repo Man flirts with a white-dude populism that can potentially be traced forward to today’s right-wing thirst for grievance.) But I dunno. While the themes I laid out are a lot more explicit in Repo Man, I suspect that only helped give me greater insight into Irma Vep’s more metaphorical treatment. 

Ultimately, the entire thought experiment says more about me than about the films I’m discussing. We see what we want inside the stories we choose to pay attention to. Unlike Otto and Maggie, I’m in a long, happy marriage, and I’ve never committed to an adventurous role with anything like their level of force and grace. And yet, I long for the transcendence that they demonstrate - to disappear from the muck and hassle of daily life into something unexpected and bizarre. 

As much as I enjoyed and admired both films, I’ll end on a skeptical note. While ostensibly decrying capitalist strictures, both of these films also prop up the systems they aim to circumvent. Capitalism tells us that the only way to succeed is through work. While these movies present us with a fantasy that work is not an end in itself, they still present it as the means of our salvation. A film will almost always be the product of a capitalist process - that said, is it possible to trust any implicit message that participation in this process is a necessary gauntlet to pass through? Do we really have to commit to the grind in order to get past it? Or is it just another trick to keep us toiling at the millstone, in the false hope that it can lead to something better? Movies are collective dreams, but it’s helpful to ask who’s doing the dreaming.