Abstract
Following critiques of French cinema's whiteness, this article explores the roles of race and gender in the television series Dix pour cent (2015–2020) and Irma Vep (2022). Both series express nostalgia towards French cinema's female icons and ethos. Dix pour cent's playful nostalgia looks to the hegemonic French femininity of renowned actresses to embody cinematic ideals. It weaves the racialised aspiring actress Sofia into these storylines in ways that reinforce French cinema's universalist self-image. Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas’ mise en abyme remake of Les Vampires, expresses melancholic nostalgia for the 1915 serial. It satirises industry debates over representation and revisits Assayas’ 1996 film of the same name, weighing the stakes of recasting Maggie Cheung with Alicia Vikander. The article locates whiteness in tensions in both series between reflecting on representation and absorbing critique in defence of a status quo in which representational politics are seen to threaten transgressive aestheticism.
On January 25, 2019, journalist Rokhaya Diallo retweeted an announcement of the nominees for the Meilleure actrice César. The original post featured red-carpet close-ups of Adèle Haenel, Cécile de France, Sandrine Kiberlain and Virginie Efira. Diallo ironically self-censors: ‘Je… Non, rien. #NoireNestPasMonMetier #Cesars2019’. On the one hand, her ellipsis aims to underscore the power of the photographic collage of white, blonde, renowned actresses to speak for itself in establishing the category's homogeneity. On the other, the ellipsis anticipates that naming and critiquing the nominees’ whiteness would prompt backlash in the French public sphere. Indeed, as Diallo later discussed in a podcast episode entitled ‘Césars So White’, she received counter-accusations of racism and challenges to name one racialised actress worthy of a nomination (Diallo and Ly, 2019).
Debates over the grande famille du cinéma français’ whiteness returned in force the following year. In a tribune in Le Parisien, industry figures denounced the relegation of ‘acteurs de couleur’ to insignificant roles that would never lead to César nominations and called for increased minority representation (Balle, 2020). One of the signatories and a leading voice behind the 2018 manifesto against racial typecasting, Noire n’est pas mon métier, Aissa Maïga, used her time on stage at the ceremony to call out this lack of diversity. Along with Adèle Haenel's exit upon Roman Polanski's Best Director win, the 2020 Césars marked a highly mediated moment of scrutiny for French cinema. Anti-racist and feminist critiques have not let up since, with initiatives like Collectif 50/50 advocating for diversity behind and in front of the camera. In 2024, the collective revived #CésarsSoWhite, attesting to the industry's continued difficulty confronting its role in reproducing whiteness’ normative power.
In light of these critiques, this article asks how racialised and gendered power dynamics infuse the French cultural industries’ self-narratives. It examines how recent television series about French cinema, Dix pour cent (France Télévisions/Netflix, 2015–2020) and Irma Vep (HBO, 2022), interweave reflections on representation with those on national cinema's place in the global cultural industries. Created by former agent Dominique Besnehard and showrunner Fanny Herrero, Dix pour cent (DPC) follows the fictional talent agency ‘ASK’, with real-life stars playing parodic versions of themselves. The miniseries Irma Vep (2022) sees auteur Olivier Assayas return to his 1996 film of the same name. Both Assayas’ film and miniseries go behind the scenes of fictional remakes of the silent serial Les Vampires (1915), with different foreign actresses starring as Irma Vep. DPC and Irma Vep's reflexive styles negotiate contemporary issues surrounding audiovisual production, as well as play upon the hegemonic Frenchness of national cinema. Following a gendered logic in French cinema's star system privileging actresses as allegories of the nation (Vincendeau, 2000: 36), both series explore representational politics through female icons in particular. What roles do whiteness and femininity play in the ways these series depict French cinema's idealised self-image, self-defence strategies and eventual self-critique? What can these series tell us about the ways French audiovisual production reproduces whiteness as the unmarked norm (Dyer, 1997)?
Across genres, self-aware techniques carry a range of effects. They enable historicisation, homage, or pastiche, but can also navigate crises of representation (Wolf, 2011). Reflexive works may comment on art's raison d’être, all while flirting with self-importance (LaRocca, 2021: 22). For television and the postmodern fiction it has influenced, reflexivity affords irony, self-deprecation and even critical introspection, but it also equips the mediums to pre-empt and neutralize critique (Wallace, 1993: 159–161). This article teases out how reflexivity's ambivalences interact with DPC and Irma Vep's distinct tones: light-hearted and grand public for the former versus densely self-referential for the latter.
I first situate DPC and Irma Vep within a recent wave of French audiovisual productions self-consciously engaging with representation. I then develop my approach within scholarship on whiteness, gender and nostalgia in the cultural industries. Through close reading, this article argues that whiteness and discourses on femininity shape the forms of nostalgia towards French cinema's icons and ethos at play in both series. Their nostalgic modes oscillate between self-critique and soul-searching on the one hand, and on the other, romanticised longing for the cultural industries’ status quo.
Whiteness, gender and nostalgia in French television series
This article contributes to growing scholarship on French audiovisual production in the era of global streaming platforms. The need for ‘postnational’ films and series to appeal to both domestic and international audiences impacts how they navigate portraying identifiable ‘Frenchness’ amidst globalised debates over the representation of race, gender and sexuality (Harrod and Moine, 2023). Emphasising spatial setting and uses of language, Mary Harrod (2023: 46; 66) shows how DPC reflexively caricatures Frenchness, whereas Drôle (2022), Herrero's Netflix series on stand-up, self-consciously depicts a post-racial France at odds with social realities. I extend this line of inquiry by probing the oft-naturalised whiteness of the internationally ‘recognizable’ Frenchness that these kinds of productions ironize.
This approach further entails exploring how whiteness intersects with such discernible Frenchness’ gendered dimensions (Vincendeau, 2023; Harrod, 2024). These aspects have often been analysed through the lens of postfeminism, which, for Angela McRobbie (2004: 255), ‘draws on and invokes feminism as that which can be taken into account’ in order to ‘emphasise that it is no longer needed’. Anne Kaftal (2023) demonstrates how Camille Cottin, including with her starring role in DPC, riffs off the Parisienne trope shaped by US postfeminist media culture, all while reinforcing franchouillard comedy's macho vulgarity. Broader postfeminist tendencies in French screen cultures exhibit a ‘melancholic nostalgia’ vis-à-vis anxieties over gender norms and national identity (Harrod, 2022: 209). This article tunes into how DPC and Irma Vep's engagements with female icons draw from both postfeminism and ‘popular feminism’, or appeals for gender equality and female empowerment that circulate widely in popular media (Banet-Weiser, 2018), in ways that reinforce whiteness’ claims to universality.
Both series depict the French film industry grappling with global attitude shifts towards representation in ways that take the form of nostalgia. Nostalgia is entwined with media, particularly television (Holdsworth, 2011), in that media use nostalgia as an aesthetic, and often long for their own histories, functionalities and content (Niemeyer, 2014: 8). Nostalgia can be both negative and positive, melancholic and utopian, moving between a dead-end fixation on the past and a means of navigating the present and future (Pickering and Keightley, 2006: 936–938). In certain forms, nostalgia also proves ironic and reflective, critically assessing its own yearnings (Hutcheon and Valdés, 2000; Boym, 2001). This article situates nostalgia in this ambivalence between a tool for evaluating industry practices in light of contemporary debates and an emotional harking back to past ideals.
Where reflexivity infuses representations of Frenchness, gender and nostalgia, whiteness proves more resistant to self-aware techniques. I therefore follow Richard Dyer's (1997: 13–14) call to ‘see the specificity of whiteness, even when the text itself is not trying to show it to you, doesn’t even know that it is there to be shown’. Dislodging whiteness from its sense of disembodied, normative authority poses challenges, since ‘whiteness as a race resides in invisible properties and whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen’ (Dyer, 1997: 45). In France, whiteness encounters distinct logics of invisibilisation. Republican universalism's emphasis on abstract citizenship and colour-blindness posits Frenchness as a kind of whiteness (Ndiaye, 2006). Given this race-blind ideology and the majority group's reluctance to recognize its whiteness, Cohen and Mazouz (2021: 3–4) argue that the French context presents a strong case for decoupling race and skin tone to instead conceptualize race as a sociopolitical construct in relation to other identity traits.
Scholarship on the French cultural industries has critically examined whiteness at the levels of production, cultural texts and reception. In cultural policy, whiteness emerges through the injunction of sociopolitical criteria for minority artistic expressions, but aesthetic criteria for creations associated with the majority group (Escafré-Dublet, 2019). Maxime Cervulle (2021 [2013]: 199–200) reveals how white audiences’ beliefs about cinema shape different manifestations of whiteness: ‘universalised whiteness’ which, in pursuit of entertainment, turns a blind eye to inequalities; guilt-ridden, ‘melancholic whiteness’ that aims to learn about difference through films; and ‘moral whiteness’, in which viewers see cinema as a space of conflicting viewpoints and themselves as arbiters therein. Through film analysis, Andrew Asibong (2013: 163) explores how iconic actresses’ performances expose whiteness’ instability as a category and the ways it feels ‘haunted’ by the Other amidst France's disavowal of race. 1
Seeking to denaturalise whiteness risks paradoxically recentring it (Dyer, 1997; Cervulle (2021) [2013]; Dosekun, 2024). My aim is not to argue that these series are predominately about whiteness, nor that their audiences are primarily white. Rather, this article traces the work whiteness does in the stories DPC and Irma Vep tell about French cinema, its regimes of representation (Hall, 2021 [1998]), and its place in globalised industry debates. I examine how characters positioned as white narratively intersect with racialised female characters and with commentary on representation. This approach asks whether, how and through which characters both series comment upon race and other social power dynamics. It attends to how whiteness is omitted, euphemised, or framed as universal. My close readings locate whiteness in DPC and Irma Vep's nostalgic affects and positioning techniques, showing how it informs tensions between critically reflecting on representation and absorbing critique in defence of a status quo in which representational politics are seen as a threat to the value of transgressive aestheticism.
Dix pour cent: playful nostalgia, feminised ideals and ‘universal’ paths to stardom
DPC's first season met domestic success when it aired on France 2 in 2015. Netflix acquired the series that same year, distributing it internationally as an ‘original’ production under the name Call my Agent!. The series follows four agents: the cinephile obsessed with discovering creative genius, Andréa (Camille Cottin); the profit-minded Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert); the dedicated, but unassured Gabriel (Grégory Montel); and the seasoned impresario Arlette (Liliane Rovère). Scholars have found DPC's blend of office dynamics and glimpses into cinema's innerworkings fertile ground to explore representations of gender, queerness and ageing (Bourdeau, 2022). For Bourdeau and King (2025: 9–11), the aspiring actress and receptionist Sofia Leprince (Stéfi Celma) offers a ‘mise en abyme’ for racial typecasting, as her narrative arc calls attention to this issue, yet ultimately perpetuates it by hinging on her perceived difference. Their conclusion notes, however, that DPC depicts Sofia's upward career trajectory through racialised obstacles in universalist terms (Bourdeau and King, 2025: 17). Reinforcing this universalist lens, co-producer Harold Valentin has attributed the series’ rare direct thematisations of Sofia's racial identity to a desire not to define characters by their minority status, whether it be Andréa's as a lesbian or Sofia's as a Black woman 2 (Haegel, 2020). In response to critiques of DPC's minimal treatment of industry racism, Celma has celebrated the subtle framing of her character's identity, whereas Valentin and Herrero admit missed opportunities and a lack of minority perspectives in the writer's room (Haegel, 2020).
Sofia provides a rich case study for DPC's representation of race, but focusing solely on her obscures the unmarked whiteness of the series’ fictionalised microcosm of French cinema, which proves key to her universalist depiction. The following close readings first demonstrate how DPC's tongue-in-cheek take on French femininity reproduces tropes whereby predominately white actresses embody the national vision of le septième art. I then identify parallels between Sofia's supporting character arc and the guest stars’ episode-level storylines. I argue that DPC envelops the up-and-coming actress’ struggles within its models of stardom in ways that both avoid delineating what meaningful racial representation would look like for her and leave the universalised whiteness of French cinema's self-image intact.
Idealising national cinema through the unmarked whiteness of La femme française
DPC's first season – with the exception of episode 6 featuring François Berléand – sees a host of white, highly visible actresses navigate gendered constraints on their careers. Thus, from the beginning, DPC stages cinema's power to reproduce norms of French femininity implicitly rooted in whiteness. Although many episodes mockingly chip away at the femme française archetype's glamourous veneer, the series relies upon its female guest stars to embody a romanticised vision of French cinema. In so doing, DPC shores up the racialised and gendered parameters determining which stars encompass the nation.
From the first episode, DPC's image of French cinema takes the familiar form of righteous opposition to Hollywood soft power. Belgian actress Cécile de France labours to master horseback riding in order to land a dream role in Quentin Tarantino's next film. After Cécile arrives late to a photoshoot, dishevelled in her riding clothes, a shot-reverse-shot sequence sees her burst through the hotel corridor's double-doors in a white, sequined gown, her blonde hair in loose curls. Cécile poses on a red-velvet daybed in an ornate ballroom, her face bathed in warm light. She allows her agent Gabriel to fix a stray hair but declines a touch-up from the make-up artist. The sequence shifts to a close-up of a monitor as the photography assistant retouches the actress’ pale skin. The episode depicts the star-making machine, drawing upon the lighting and photography techniques that were essential to producing cinematic ideals of whiteness (Dyer, 1997).
While Cécile discusses the Hollywood role with the interviewer, Gabriel receives a text from Tarantino's producer, announcing that she will not be cast: ‘Problème d’âge. Sorry’. Throughout the episode, Gabriel avoids delivering the crushing news to the star. It is naïve newcomer Camille (Fanny Sidney) who reveals the truth. Opposing Cécile's confidence in her age to Hollywood's ‘Barbies tout en plastoc’, Camille reinforces the opposition between the stripped-back beauty of France's iconic actresses and the superficial Hollywood machine. When the calculating Mathias confronts Tarantino's producer, he cements Cécile's metonymical function for the Hexagon's artistic passion. Pointing out that the Minister of Culture is a fan and close friend of the actress, he threatens to weaponize France's infamous bureaucracy to prevent Tarantino from shooting on location: ‘Pas de Cécile, pas de Paris’. As the first star to play herself, Cécile de France has a crucial role in DPC, serving as the blonde, blue-eyed, feminine face for its vision of French cinema's place in the global cultural industries.
Episode 2 secures iconic actresses as stand-ins for French cinema, opposing Françoise Fabian and Line Renaud as emblems of their respective genres. A sequence interspersing each actress describing the other links the juxtaposition of film genres to the trope of French femininity each embodies. Line lauds the ‘grande actrice’ for her ‘allure’, ‘élégance un peu rigide’ and ability to make audiences feel more intelligent, before dubbing her: ‘la femme française’. Françoise praises Line's blue-eyed ‘regard de légende’ and status as ‘l’éternelle bonne copine’ that has her ‘dans le cœur de tous les Français’. She exaggerates that audiences would find Line ‘sympathique’ even if she played an SS officer. Renaud thus embodies popular comedy and a familiar, endearing femininity, while Fabian represents drama and the archetypal femme française – alluring, yet intimidating in her intelligence and elegance. The opposition echoes the intersection of highbrow references and mainstream appeal that is key to DPC's self-positioning (Harrod, 2023: 54). The scene's cross-cut editing creates an effect of the two actresses’ finishing one another's sentences, adding to the impression that they are describing two sides of the same coin.
Self-conscious play upon the femme française and recourse to iconic actresses as the face of national cinema also structure Season 3 Episode 4. Isabelle Huppert, poking fun at her work addiction, breaches an exclusive Hollywood contract. Isabelle darts between embodying the elusive Parisienne in the American flick, She's a femme fatale, and Marie de Médicis in a French heritage film. Her frantic shuffling comically underlines how each project encapsulates different cinematic productions of Frenchness. When the American producers discover the star's duplicity, the threat of a crushing lawsuit throws ASK into crisis.
The season 3 finale revolves around this conflict. To claim Isabelle never filmed for the French project on the night in question, Gabriel's assistant, Hervé (Nicolas Maury), suggests hiring a homonym to play Marie de Médicis’ ghost. He justifies the scheme through surrealist repertoires à la Cocteau. Andréa tracks down another ‘Isabelle Huppert’, eventually persuading a nurse to shoot ad hoc scenes as the ghost. Showing the footage to the producers, Andréa delivers an impassioned speech crystallising a David vs. Goliath confrontation with Hollywood's ultrasophisticated technology: ‘En France, on n’a pas beaucoup d’argent, c’est vrai, mais on a des idées’. Bolstering the scene's tongue-in-cheek nationalism, she reworks a 1974 public service campaign from the global oil crisis – ‘En France, on n’a pas de pétrole, mais on a des idées’. Like Hervé, Andréa mobilises French surrealist poetics: ‘Maybe you know André Breton?’ The episode thus romanticises French cinema as the aesthete, scrappy underdog facing off against Hollywood, with the battlelines drawn around Isabelle Huppert.
With healthy doses of self-deprecation, DPC mixes parody of French cinema's mythologised self-image with nostalgic reverence towards its stars. The series both exposes cinema's role in upholding dominant tropes of French femininity, and reinscribes its white, feminine icons as the embodiments of national filmmaking ideals. These emblems delineate the repertoire of cinematic success through which Sofia strives to chart her own path.
Intersecting storylines and French cinema's universal self-image
As the series progresses, Sofia's storylines increasingly mirror those of the guest actresses. While such parallels gesture towards Sofia's inclusion, they also contribute to the universalist portrayal of her trajectory. Season 1 Episode 4 intersects Audrey Fleurot's storyline with Sofia's through beauty, desirability and restricted repertoires. When Sofia shows Gabriel her headshots, he marvels at her grace and ‘beauté un peu… particulière, à la fois simple, naturelle’. Echoing this recognition of Sofia's beauty, the episode cuts to Mathias persuading a director to cast Audrey as an exotic dancer and climate activist. Both men describe her as ‘sublime’ and ‘magnifique’. Mathias invokes the femme française trope: ‘C’est le glamour qui rencontre l’intelligence’, but neglects to mention Audrey's motherhood. The omission becomes the episode's central tension as Audrey strains to correspond to the roles – cinematic and social – the men have assigned her.
This conflict parallels Gabriel's difficulty finding roles for Sofia. The episode frames Sofia's typecasting, however, through racial difference. In a montage of phone calls, Gabriel grows frustrated with numerous casting directors. The first finds Sofia: ‘Bien, mais trop typée’. Gabriel challenges this coded language, ‘Tu veux dire quoi? Trop noire?’ The juxtaposition with another's feedback exposes the semantic ambiguity of typé: ‘Elle n’est pas assez typée pour le rôle de la nounou. Elle a la personnalité qu’il faut mais…. Elle est… comment dire…’ Gabriel again makes the euphemism plain: ‘Trop blanche?’ Another director rejects colourblind casting, as Sofia playing a PhD candidate would necessitate problematising race in the script: ‘sinon, c’est un sujet en soi’. These racialised expectations play off one another, illustrating how rigid notions of social realism inform possibilities for roles and restrict Sofia's professional opportunities.
Audrey and Sofia's storylines intersect to critique the industry's lack of imagination. When Audrey brings her children to a meeting, Mathias is irked: ‘Audrey, les réalisateurs n’ont aucune imagination. S’ils voient une femme avec des petits enfants, ils pensent couches-culottes et biberons’. The director's imagination provides comic incongruity in the meeting. As he passionately describes a scene in which her character rolls around in trash and rips off her shirt, the actress begins lactating. With Gabriel and Hervé's help, she flees to feed her newborn. After negotiating a break with the director from behind Gabriel's office door, the men turn to see Audrey bathed in sunlight, the baby suckling on her breast. They stand in boyish reverence as organ music and a vocalising choir humorously accentuate connotations of divine motherhood. The music continues as the sequence cuts to a red-haired dancer, aglow in neon light, twisting around a pole. A shot of the director, eyes closed, hand outstretched, fades in, establishing the preceding images as a glimpse into his cinematic vision. The juxtaposition brings the supposed paradox of maternity and desirability restricting Audrey to its apex.
The episode similarly attributes Sofia's typecasting to the industry's myopia. Believing his last-ditch effort at colourblind casting successful, Gabriel proclaims to Hervé: ‘Il y a dans ce petit monde du cinéma français des réalisateurs suffisamment intelligents et inventifs pour faire jouer à une métisse le rôle d’une comtesse dans un film d’époque’. With sharp comedic timing, Hervé dashes his dreams: ‘Ah non, Sofia c’est pour jouer l’esclave’. Despite Gabriel's shame, Sofia is elated by the news. Her enthusiasm injects incongruity for comedic effect, but with key stakes for DPC's treatment of racial typecasting. On the one hand, Sofia's reaction undercuts the ‘white saviour’ tones of Gabriel's negotiations on her behalf – foreshadowing her denunciation of his own racialised presumptions two episodes later. 3 On the other, it evacuates tension, trivialising typecasting as another instance of Gabriel's overzealous anxieties taking over.
Audrey and Sofia's storylines intersect through gendered dynamics of desirability and limited imaginations. However, the emphasis on Fleurot's sublime beauty, of which the whiteness remains narratively unmarked, positions her character's battle against paradoxical notions of motherhood and sexuality as a universally female one. Sofia's storyline, with her beauty subtly particularised via Gabriel, is crafted around narrow industry expectations for racial minorities. The range of caricatured roles sees Sofia encompass racial typecasting across genders, as Gabriel debates her suitability for roles typically gendered as masculine (‘the dealer’ and ‘the cop’) as well as roles invoking long-restricted repertoires for Black actresses (‘the nanny’ and ‘the countess’ slave’). This both glosses over intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) challenges for racialised actresses and leaves Audrey to embody universalised struggles with female sexuality.
Later episodes interlace Sofia and the guest stars’ plotlines more explicitly through the gendered lens of desirability. These parallels maintain the dynamic between universality and particularity, while securing iconic actresses as paragons of French cinema's values. Season 2 Episode 4 revolves around Isabelle Adjani and fictional German director Sacha Hartman. Characters laud Isabelle Adjani as ‘poétique’ (Hervé) and ‘l’icône du cinéma français’ (Andréa), setting up Hartman's (Samuel Theis) seemingly inexplicable refusal to cast her. He eventually reveals that this refusal stems from his childhood fixation on the actress and his humiliation when she declined his first feature.
Sofia's storyline parallels Isabelle's through the trope of desire between male directors and actresses. Andréa explains to Gabriel that such desire lies at the heart of cinema, echoing the notion that eroticised director-muse dynamics nourish auteur cinema's boundaryless aestheticism (Sellier, 2024). Andréa's remarks ease Gabriel's jealousy after his client, Julien Doré, casts Sofia in his erotic musical, L’Océan jouit. Unaware of Sofia and Gabriel's romantic relationship, Doré muses: ‘Elle a l’allure, le naturel, le charme. C’est… c’est une grosse charnelle. C’est une sensitive’. While Isabelle Adjani's allure inspires Hartman's love for cinema, Doré articulates Sofia's through a carnal eroticism that recalls a lineage of stereotypes of hypersexualised Black women (Bourdeau and King, 2025: 10).
Hartman's passion captivates Isabelle when she hears him giving a radio interview. The host remarks upon Hartman's love for France and mastery of its language before revisiting his polemical first film. The pull between auteur and actress reflects French cinema's self-image as a magnetic force attracting daring foreign talent (Mazdon, 2007). It is telling that Adjani's ‘poetic’ femininity distils this borderless allure, as her proximity to hegemonic, white Frenchness was challenged earlier in her career. Criticised for denouncing anti-immigrant sentiment, she felt forced to divulge her father's Algerianness (Collins, 1990). Heralded as a national icon in DPC, Adjani personifies French cinema's universalism, which draws diverse films into its fold through ostensibly aesthetic criteria, yet relies upon their difference to accentuate its eclecticism. DPC similarly intersects Sofia's storylines with those of its exclusively white (or positioned in proximity to whiteness) guest actresses through universalised narrative nodes of desirability and the constraints of normative femininity, while simultaneously underscoring the up-and-coming actress’ racial difference.
Between French cinema's ‘hope’ and staging the status quo
The season 3 finale seeks to carve out space for Sofia within French cinema's self-narrative. The camera follows her throughout a soirée at ASK's office as she mingles, sullenly contemplates the Parisian cityscape, and eventually breaks down crying to Camille over her lack of opportunities. Among the guests, showrunner Fanny Herrero and co-creator Dominique Besnehard make cameos. The latter drones on about unknown French actresses who met tragic endings, either in the background or to main characters who brush him off. Fading in and out of attention, Besnehard's film history discourse provides a backdrop for Sofia's loss of faith and spotlights her triumph when Hervé and Camille announce her nomination for the Révélation féminine César. The episode portrays Sofia as the embattled agency's hope, both narratively through industry veteran Arlette's use of the category's original name, ‘Meilleur espoir féminin’, and visually, when the burnt-out ‘ASK’ sign reilluminates above Sofia.
The historicising discourse spills over into the season four premiere. Besnehard returns to present the Révélation féminine award at the Césars. We hear him tracing the prize's history back to its first recipient, Danielle Darrieux, as the camera finds Andréa's partner Colette (Ophélia Kolb) placing their daughter in her crib. Besnehard's offscreen voice mixes with the sound of a music box, attributing a lulling effect to his enumeration of past winners. A subsequent three-quarter shot highlights Colette mindlessly watching the out-of-frame television. When her phone dings, a text from ‘Eva’ appears onscreen: ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est chiant les César cette année…’ The female co-presenter eventually implores Besnehard to open the envelope. Through the women's reactions, the episode again treats historicising gestures with bored disinterest, mocking industry figures fixated on the past.
The surge of new energy amidst such nostalgia, however, will not be Sofia. The episode cuts to her bursting from the auditorium. As Camille consoles Sofia, echoes of the unnamed winner's acceptance speech compete with the onscreen dialogue. Charlotte Gainsbourg, 1986's espoir féminin, aids in the encouragement. Two episodes later, DPC introduces the winner – a white, blonde actress named Mélanie Meyer (Nadia Tereszkiewicz). Sofia's disappointment is framed against her white peers’ successes. The treatment of her nomination thus satirises ‘old guard’ nostalgia while ultimately staging the industry reiterating its status quo.
In the series finale, Sofia's role in a François Ozon film is in jeopardy. It is fitting that DPC namedrops Ozon, given the auteur's proclivity for reflexivity, best encapsulated in 2002's 8 femmes. 8 femmes’ meta-commentary on female stardom honours the likes of Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Danielle Darrieux and Firmine Richard. Richard's role draws upon legacies of Black female representation, evoking Hattie McDaniel's Oscar-winning role in Gone with the Wind and Juanita Moore's nominated role in An Imitation of Life. Richard notably co-wrote Noire n’est pas mon métier, and McDaniel's character is an oft-cited example of racial stereotyping. Crucially, Sofia's Ozon role remains nondescript. DPC therefore does not weigh in on what a career-defining part would look like for her. It leaves open whether it would be a character written as a Black woman and fleshed-out beyond superficial stereotype, or if it would stem from the colourblind casting Gabriel advocated for on her behalf.
DPC's mockery of a form of industry nostalgia bogged down in film history and prone to self-seriousness accentuates its own playful nostalgia. This light-hearted nostalgia grants guest stars space to parody their repertoires and public images, all while lauding their legacies. Whiteness emerges through DPC's reverence for feminine icons and romanticisation of French cinema's universalist ethos. The series’ reflexivity towards representational possibilities for actresses bolsters recourse to white, feminine embodiments of national cinema's ideals. Such storylines often integrate Sofia, but in ways that place her on the same path to stardom as the – exclusively white or positioned in proximity to whiteness – female guest stars. DPC shies away from charting Sofia's trajectory as a racialised performer, leaving whiteness intact as the industry's unmarked racial norm, even as it seeks to challenge its gendered ones.
Irma Vep: iconic ‘spirits’, representational politics and auteur melancholia
Olivier Assayas’ 1996 film, Irma Vep, and 2022 miniseries of the same name follow fictional remakes of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires. Feuillade's 1915 silent serial tracks the eponymous criminal gang and their muse, Irma Vep. Against the backdrop of Third Republic moral conservatism, Irma Vep performed deviant femininity for ‘masculine scopophilia’, but also conveyed female freedom of movement (Butler, 2002: 197). An ‘inky fetish’ (Butler, 2002: 201) capturing Paris’ shadowy underbelly in her black bodysuit, Irma Vep and Musidora, the actress who brought her to life, opposed Pearl White, early US cinema's blonde, feminine ideal. The Eastern European connotations surrounding vampires and Irma Vep's dark sensuality ascribed alterity, compounded by the ways cinematic ‘vamps’ channelled views of immigrants as threats to the national body (Butler, 2002: 203). Irma Vep is therefore a potent filmic icon with complex ties to masculine desire, empowered femininity and the precarious boundaries of hegemonic Frenchness.
Assayas’ 1996 film takes up this legacy. Much ink has been spilled over his decision to have Maggie Cheung ‘play herself’ as ‘Maggie’, a Hong Kong action film star whom enigmatic auteur René Vidal casts as Irma Vep. In the film, René deems it ‘blasphemy’ to cast another French actress after Musidora. He finds Maggie ‘mysterious’ and ‘magic’ like Irma Vep, but, most importantly, she embodies his ‘modern’ vision. Reading this scene, Olivia Khoo (2007: 94) contends that ‘René's mourning for a lost, idealised past (and woman), involves an anagrammatical translation of the exotic into a magical, yet modern difference – a modern Chinese exotic – where sameness is blasphemy’. Like René, other white, French characters, including costume designer Zoé, 4 project their desires onto Maggie. They encode a hypersexualised Chinese femininity, epitomised by Maggie's latex catsuit costume (Khoo, 2007: 91). As Mila Zuo (2022: 91) argues, the catsuit's impervious material also symbolises Maggie's resistant performance, in which she reworks stereotypes of Chinese inscrutability to deflect the other characters’ projections.
The catsuit further makes Maggie's body a site where ‘the elasticity of French identity itself is tested’ (Zuo, 2022: 76). In this vein, Cheung's presence fuels the film's probing of French cinema's instability in an increasingly globalised cultural marketplace (Hudson, 2006). Scholars have read her character as a failed overture towards hybridity, leaving viewers with an ironised image of national cinema shoring up its borders (Hughes, 2004). Indeed, the film ends with René suffering a breakdown and his replacement – who is disdainfully dismissive of a Chinese actress playing Irma Vep – recasting a white, French actress in the role.
Assayas returned to Irma Vep in 2022 with a miniseries in transatlantic collaboration with HBO and independent production company A24. Star and co-producer Alicia Vikander plays a more fictionalised version of herself than Cheung's ‘Maggie’. Vikander's ‘Mira Harberg’, a Swedish actress known for Hollywood blockbusters, is fresh off a Marvel-esque superhero film and eager to challenge herself creatively with René Vidal. As with the 1996 film, Irma Vep (2022) observes the people who create cinema as they navigate industry and societal transformations. The miniseries ponders the relationship between art and industry in the streaming era, desire in the creative process post-#MeToo, and Musidora's legacy (Campion, 2024).
As with DPC, I locate whiteness in Irma Vep's treatment of cinema's feminine embodiments, dynamics between white and racialised characters, and framing of debates over representation. Unlike DPC's playful romanticisation of French cinema's icons, Irma Vep captures the duality of melancholy and yearning for re-enchantment within nostalgia. I first explore its melancholic fixation on Feuillade's serial and Musidora as lost ideals, tracing how Mira diverges from Maggie in ways that equip her to channel this nostalgia. I then argue that the miniseries’ reckoning with Maggie Cheung's absence unveils a racial melancholia underlying this attachment to the original. Her absence prompts introspection, efforts to neutralise critique, and cynical instrumentalisations from white characters. The final section examines how such manifestations of whiteness intersect further with gender to satirise representational politics.
Melancholic nostalgia for the original
Much like Assayas’ 1996 film, Irma Vep (2022) is haunted by debates over the merits of remakes (Campion, 2024: 117). In the film, while René laments that his ‘soulless’ images do not match Feuillade's, his avowed motivation for revisiting the classic lies in his desire for Maggie and her ‘modern’ Irma Vep. For their part, his cast and crew are bemused by or even flippant towards the project. In contrast, the 2022 miniseries latches onto Feuillade's serial. In so doing, it expresses melancholic nostalgia, understood through Freud's (1917 [1953]) notion of melancholia as a pathological form of mourning fixated on a lost object of love or ideal. The sense of a lost ideal resonates with René's (Vincent Macaigne) confession to Mira that he no longer cares about movies (Episode 1). The possibility for re-enchantment with cinema prompts dogmatic efforts to bridge the gap between the remake and the original. The miniseries-within-the-miniseries’ cast and crew routinely reach for archives to calculate their interpretation's fidelity. This impulse manifests through footage from the serial shown on smartphones and scenes reenacting Musidora's memoirs, with Mira playing the French actress. As Mira affirms to costume designer Zoé: ‘The original was perfect’ (Episode 2).
Mira is crucial to conveying this melancholic nostalgia, and key distinctions between her character and Maggie enable this function. The miniseries notably abandons the latex catsuit, which in the 1996 film was inspired by Catwoman and sourced from a sex shop, for a return to the silk of Paul Poiret's design for Musidora. This trades the hypersexualised Chinese femininity encoded in Maggie's costume for a fantasy rooted in the French fashion and film archive. Mira, distancing herself from her franchise-dominated career, supports the decision: ‘Irma Vep is not a superhero. She doesn’t need body armour. And I mean, look [holds up an archival image], she's not afraid of her femininity. Her femininity is what scares her foes’ (Episode 1). As Mira slinks around in the prototype, a costume assistant remarks how Musidora ‘unleashed Feuillade's fantasies’. With the final mythologising word, Zoé (Jeanne Balibar) announces the haunting gripping the miniseries: ‘Individually, they had their limits, but together, they made film history. The ghost of Irma Vep has been haunting cinema ever since’.
Mira is integral to the miniseries’ near-pedagogical approach to sealing Irma Vep's legacy. In the 1996 film, Maggie's unfamiliarity with French cinema and René's oeuvre stresses her foreignness and, for certain characters, the peculiarity of the auteur's casting decision. Mira, however, proves well-versed in René's filmography and Irma Vep's storied past. In Episode 1, she and René take turns citing Irma Vep's opposition to Pearl White's ‘damsel in distress’, Musidora's fetish status for the Surrealists and multi-faceted career as a novelist, critic, and director, as well as a 1970s feminist film collective named for her. Such moments serve a dual purpose. First, they transmit film history, providing depth to Irma Vep and Musidora. Second, their myth-making function glosses over Irma Vep's historical connotations of ethnic alterity to mould the elusive character into a paragon of French cinematic ideals – particularly a roguish, feminine sensuality those ideals intertwine with art's moral ambiguities.
For instance, when crew members critique René for a sexualised scene in which the villain Moreno drugs, kidnaps and runs his hands over Irma Vep, he claims to be reproducing ‘quasi à l’identique’ Feuillade's original (Episode 5). René recalls that the préfet de police threatened to shut the serial down over the same scene, equating his critics with state censorship. Mira is again pivotal in the conflict. During filming, cutaways show René engrossed in the action, imitating Moreno's gestures. When he asks to extend the scene, Mira refuses, finding it sufficiently intense. Her impatience contrasts with a later discussion, in which she affirms that the scene is sexy and true to Irma Vep's villainess appeal, ‘whatever the Puritans will say’. René, spiralling over the crew's critiques, seeks reassurance: ‘It turns me on. Does that make me a pervert?’ To his disappointment, she confirms that it does, and coaches him to consider potential harm before unleashing his imagination.
The scene mirrors one from the 1996 film, in which René confesses to Maggie his ‘fantasy’ of her in the part and costume. Maggie tries to reframe: ‘That's desire, and I think it's okay, because that's what we make movies with’. René's disillusionment with the project and the deceptive nature of his fantasy remains steadfast: ‘you think you are at the core of the thing, but in fact, you are just on the surface’. Maggie says she is simply having fun playing a part, upsetting the gravity René assigns to his frustration. The female protagonists unite in their function of affirming the auteur's white, male, desirous gaze as intrinsic to his creative vision.
Where Maggie struggles to coax René past his frustrated fantasy of her, Mira indulges the reliance on Musidora to secure transgression as a broader, historically-rooted ideal. She recollects a passage in Musidora's memoirs ‘endors[ing] Feuillade's twisted fantasies’, prompting René to frantically draft a reenactment scene in which Mira, as Musidora, negotiates with the préfet. She opposes Pathé's US-based production, The Perils of Pauline, to Feuillade ‘giving jobs to our own heroic young men returning from the front’. Shutting down the film, she warns, could be considered ‘antipatriotique’. The scene's cool-toned filter, stilted acting and Mira/Musidora's heavy French accent in English ironize its nationalist tone. Yet, through the veil of irony, the recourse to Musidora as metonym for national cinematic ideals serves the more serious objectives of reflecting on desire in the auteur's creative process and harnessing that reflexivity to neutralise critique.
Irma Vep therefore rejoins DPC's reverence for female icons and romanticisation of desire between auteurs and actresses. The intertextuality between Maggie and Mira's reassurances recalls the tension between particularity and universality in the parallels between Sofia and DPC's guest stars. Racialised actresses feature in meta-reflections on desire and filmmaking, but in ways that hinge upon fantasies of fetishised difference. Meanwhile, actresses positioned in proximity to the majority group facilitate a montée en généralité that cements eroticised dynamics as integral to French auteur cinema's transgressive aesthetics.
Irma Vep's treatment of its characters’ melancholic fixation on the original further departs from DPC's mockery of industry figures engrossed in the past. While obsessive comparisons fuel Irma Vep's self-aware caricature of capricious auteurs, Feuillade and Musidora's near-supernatural presence feeds an earnest quest to reconnect with cinema's soul. Irma Vep's melancholic nostalgia thus ironizes its self-historicising gestures and indulges nostalgia's deep urge to reach backwards for authenticity (Hutcheon and Valdés, 2000: 23). In this sense, Assayas’ (2022) miniseries stages a remake that retreats from the 1996 film's use of alterity to pinpoint national cinema's precariousness, instead seeking refuge in French film history to anchor its artistic values. The change in female protagonist, rewritten from a racialised to a white actress, is at the heart of this move, enacting shifts from surface-level fantasy to archival depth, from unfamiliarity to shared knowledge, and from modernising particularity to a compatible conduit for the original's spirit.
Racial melancholia and contained self-critique
Though traces of Maggie shape Mira's role in Irma Vep, the 2022 miniseries initially ignores, then gradually reckons with its 1996 predecessor. Musidora's Irma Vep is therefore not the only ghost hovering over the set. No stranger to using autobiographical elements in his work, Assayas, who was married to Maggie Cheung from 1998 to 2001, doubles his life through René, who reluctantly works through his divorce from ‘Jade Lee’, the Chinese star of his own Irma Vep film. The obsessive returns to Feuillade overlay Assayas/René's efforts to process the love and loss of Cheung/Jade. The latter duo's haunting absence configures the miniseries’ eventual confrontation with racialised femininity's role in the 1996 film, as well as with the representational stakes of recasting Cheung with Vikander. This contained confrontation unveils a racial melancholia underpinning the fixation on the original.
I draw here from Anne Anlin Cheng, who posits racialisation as a melancholic practice for both dominant, white culture and for racialised subjects. Cheng (2000: 9) builds from Freud's melancholia, in which the melancholic seeks to incorporate the object of loss into the ego, but gets stuck as feelings of guilt, denial, or resentment come back up, resulting in self-denigration. In a similar dynamic, she argues that whiteness as cultural ideal is ‘secured through the melancholic introjection of racial others that it can neither fully relinquish nor accommodate and whose ghostly presence nonetheless guarantees its centrality’ (Cheng, 2000: xi). The ‘imbricated yet denied’ relationship to racial others Cheng (2000: 12) identifies as the heart of melancholic white identity and its cultural expressions resonates with Irma Vep's treatment of Maggie/Jade. In compulsively reaching back to Feuillade, the miniseries initially reaches over the 1996 film but gets stuck on that previous remake's modern vision for Irma Vep, to which exoticised fantasy was integral. Through different characters, the confrontation with Maggie/Jade's ‘ghostly’ presence takes various forms, from healing introspection to performative white guilt to transferals that re-essentialise Chineseness.
Irma Vep works through this racial melancholia with recurring scenes of René in psychoanalysis. In Episode 2, René and his psychotherapist (Dominique Reymond) dissect his bodysuit fetish. In the subsequent episode, she diagnoses repression as the root of the director's angoisse, bringing up his previous remake of Les Vampires. With sounds of a film reel whirring, the scene cuts to footage from Assayas’ 1996 film, with Irma Vep in her catsuit and mask, scampering across Parisian rooftops. 5 The psychotherapist suggests that René is remaking Irma Vep because he is not at peace with it. René insists that the new version is something else entirely, to which she interjects: ‘À une importante différence près’. He stutters in avoidant confusion: ‘euh… je… pardon hein, je vois pas, est-ce que je peux avoir un petit indice?’ The therapist acquiesces: ‘Jade Lee’.
René reluctantly rehashes the ‘failed marriage’ as the scene cuts back to footage from the 1996 film, notably the experimental final cut that the film version of René compiles after being fired. That version of René scratches over the film reel in homage to the Lettrist tradition, where such chiselling emphasised the image's form, negating its semantic content (Uroskie, 2011) Critics note that the carvings obliterate Maggie's eyes, which are racialised markers (Hudson, 2006: 227), and thus indicate René acknowledging failure to surmount his surface-level, fetishised desire (Zuo, 2022: 87).
The therapist probes: ‘Si je ne me trompe pas vous le faites avec une actrice américaine’. Despite Mira's Swedish background, René confirms, suggesting her origins are insignificant and unworthy of precision. When the therapist asks why not a Chinese actress, he replies: ‘Ça me rappellerait trop Jade’. These scenes frame the recasting through René's melancholic failure to process the divorce. His repression re-essentialises Chineseness, in that any actress of similar origin would be a painful reminder of his ex-wife. The pseudonym ‘Jade Lee’ crystallises this essentialisation. On the one hand, the moniker may pull from Assayas’ appreciation for Hong Kong action cinema to blend martial arts star Bruce Lee with ‘Jade Fox’, the villain from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). On the other, ‘Jade’ invokes an ornamental Chinese exotic, and, via the therapist's analysis, puts its unresolved absence at the core of René's compulsive return to Les Vampires.
Cheung's performance visually haunts 2022's Irma Vep. The miniseries superimposes shots of her character scurrying about her hotel in costume as Mira does the same, creating the effect of the two fusing into the Irma Vep archetype. In Episode 4, Maggie's ghostly presence translates into a ‘haunting’ from Jade (Vivian Wu), when a dreaming René finds his ex-wife in his apartment. Her apparition is set up as a humorous effect of the language barrier at Jade's expense. She misremembers René calling her a ‘spirit’ instead of a ‘free spirit’. Jade addresses René remaking Irma Vep without her. He reminisces about their good times together but admits, ‘I don’t uh, remember the person you really were. I loved you. But I’m not sure I knew you’. René – and perhaps Assayas by proxy – vulnerably acknowledges the blinders put up by infatuation. Jade exposes the intimate layer underneath the miniseries’ melancholic nostalgia for Feuillade's original: ‘The ghosts of Irma Vep are not just ghosts, they’re our ghosts’.
The episode marks a shift from René's pathological avoidance of Jade's place in his personal and professional past, to Irma Vep performatively grappling with racialised femininity's role in its previous incarnation. In the penultimate episode, Mira, imbued with Irma Vep's spirit, moves through walls to bestow ghostly visits upon other characters. She joins Jade at René's, where they share dismay over the director's dire mental state. Mira confesses a ‘strange guilt about being Irma Vep’ since she's ‘a Westerner. Actually, I’m Swedish, but I guess I’ve become an American actress [scoffs.]’ Jade stoically lets Mira elaborate: ‘Well, Irma Vep was a Chinese character, and it's this whole cultural appropriation thing going on, and I’m not sure… what to do with it. I’m not sure I’m on the right side of it’. Mira's repositioning Irma Vep as a Chinese character and anxiety over cultural appropriation run counter to the miniseries’ extensive historicisation – efforts she largely voiced herself. This reassurance-seeking posture recalls melancholia's indulgent self-denigration, which can impede nostalgia's potential for critical self-reflection (Boym, 2001: 55). Mira brings to the fore white guilt over her potential complicity in erasing Jade's Irma Vep. The miniseries thus pre-empts critique for the recasting, albeit half-heartedly. Mira euphemises whiteness by calling herself ‘Western’, while Jade listens, without naming whiteness either. Jade in fact reassures Mira, denying Irma Vep's Chineseness and asserting her own cosmopolitan background. Irma Vep places the two actresses on a level playing field of transnational stardom. Yet, despite downplaying Jade's perceived cultural and racial differences, they remain essential to the scene's self-soothing gesture.
Irma Vep nevertheless flirts with transferal from Jade to Cynthia Keng, a Chinese singer-turned-actress cast as ‘Lily Flower’. The villain Moreno enlists Lily to impersonate Irma Vep and infiltrate the Vampires (Episode 5). The career of Fala Chen, who plays Cynthia, bears striking resemblance to Cheung's, as both women gained notoriety through Hong Kong beauty pageants (McHenry, 2022). The miniseries presents this casting as a cynical calculation from the principal financier, Gautier (Pascal Greggory), a French luxury brand CEO. Gautier reminds René of his promise to hire a Chinese actress, underscoring China's importance as a market and increasing economic threat (Episode 4). Irma Vep thus returns to the issue of essentialising Chinese actresses, only to project it onto one of its targets of satire: commercial interests threatening the creative processes.
However, in the finale, René admits to Cynthia a transferal of his own. When Cynthia requests to wrap early, René fears he has disappointed her. He reveals: ‘I imagined you would be, um… Jade's surrogate’. With pity, Cynthia affirms that is Mira's role. The director sheepishly looks down at his hands: ‘I wanted you to be the spirit of Jade… [gestures towards empty space] haunting the film’. The scene epitomises the miniseries’ efforts to exorcise its ghosts, and its reliance on female characters for reassurance therein. René confesses his fetishisation of Jade and transferal onto Cynthia simply for her Chineseness, only to find peace with these dynamics haunting his filmmaking. Irma Vep therefore rides a tension between questioning its representations and performing whiteness through melancholia, self-indulgent guilt and pre-empted critique.
Whiteness in/as cynicism towards representation
In addition to the performances of whiteness elicited by Jade's apparitions, whiteness circulates through Irma Vep's treatment of industry discourse on representation. Assayas, who signed the aforementioned tribune advocating for more diversity in French cinema, depicts his white characters struggling to meet the current cultural moment in ways that are both satirised and romanticised. In this sense, I liken Irma Vep to what Lagerwey and Nygaard (2020) have called ‘horrible white people shows’, a recent subgenre of anglophone prestige comedies, such as Broad City and Fleabag, which reflexively foreground white characters’ anxieties and impotent self-critique. While Irma Vep does not explicitly problematise whiteness in its characters’ struggles, whiteness intersects with gender to inform their views of representational politics as irrelevant, something to be manipulated, or a threat to the artistic value of transgression. These forms of whiteness contrast the moralising whiteness DPC's Gabriel performs in calling out racial typecasting. Irma Vep moves between mocking its white characters and identifying with them. It weaves between striving to reconcile creative freedom with the ethical and moral stakes of what is shown on screen and feeding melancholic nostalgia for a time when filmmaking was free of such questions.
Irma Vep pokes fun at social messages in Hollywood blockbusters, with Mira deflecting efforts to politicise her roles. She vents to her assistant about the media's obsession with whether her franchise film's shocking twist is a radical feminist act: ‘I am so sick of discussing Doomsday and why Nausicaa sliced her superhero husband's throat and cut off his testicles’ (Episode 1). Throughout the press junket, she uses sarcasm and feigned confusion to dodge questions inciting her to frame the film through gender equality. Her stance recalls the reflexive irony with which postfeminism invokes feminist critiques to stress their obsolescence (McRobbie, 2004: 259). Mira's manoeuvring to secure a ‘neutral’ place above the fray of cultural politics further aligns with whiteness’ attempts to, ‘speak and act disinterestedly as humanity's most average and unremarkable representatives’ (Dyer, 1997: 223).
In contrast to Mira's sarcasm, Doomsday's director, Herman (Byron Bowers), a Black American filmmaker who started out making low-budget zombie films, eagerly anticipates Oscar buzz. His prediction nods towards the Academy's recent embrace of superhero franchises in the ‘major’ categories, exemplified by Black Panther's (2018) ‘Best Picture’ nomination. Through Mira's dismissals of Doomsday's social impact and quality, Irma Vep satirises the legitimising effect of sociopolitical resonance and representational value on blockbuster films. As in DPC, Hollywood provides a foil for Assayas’ auteuriste ideals, but where DPC emphasised Hollywood's colossal budgets and superficial beauty standards, Irma Vep targets its instrumentalisation of identity. Unlike DPC's earnest appeals for more imaginative on-screen possibilities for women, Irma Vep mockingly pushes calls for female representation and social messages to absurd, castrating levels.
Beyond Mira, multiple white, male characters exhibit cynicism towards social justice issues. Robert, a respected theatre actor playing the Grand Vampire, becomes disgruntled after René denies any sexual tension between his character and Irma Vep. In retaliation, Robert makes himself spokesperson for a diverse (in perceived gender and racial identities) subsection of the crew denouncing the sexualised kidnapping scene (Episode 5). The most caricatural in this regard is Gottfried (Lars Eidinger), the drug-abusing German actor playing Moreno. Gottfried courts controversy, even alluding to his ‘friend’ Harvey Weinstein. In Episode 3, he decries in an interview ‘all those Latinos stealing our jobs’. When asked if a Latino had indeed ever taken his job, he pivots to the state of the film industry: ‘Well, no, not exactly. But, I mean, look at the Academy Awards. It's all about Mexican directors and Koreans’. Gottfried parodies reactionary nostalgia amidst racialised Others’ successes.
Many characters show contempt for Gottfried, but for some it mixes with reluctant endearment. At his goodbye drinks, the actor confesses frequent boredom during filming, but acknowledges that, ‘thanks to René, the ghosts were there’, and that the ghosts love Mira. Despite cutaways to annoyed cast and crewmembers, Zoé and Mira watch him in amusement. Though, in earlier episodes, both women expressed distaste for Gottfried, Mira declares back: ‘I love you’. Gottfried pursues his ode to the long-lost taste for transgression: ‘Cinema was for the bad guys… and the bad girls. Like Musidora… like rock n’ roll used to be’. While Gottfried represents the extreme of the miniseries’ ‘horrible white people’, he also espouses cinema's anarchic pleasures and Musidora's ethos, making him more nuanced than a condemnable caricature. Indeed, in an interview with France Culture, Assayas cites provocative German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder not only as the inspiration for Gottfried, but as one of his own objects of nostalgia. He extends this nostalgia to a certain ‘irresponsibility’ in French cinema's history. As for Mira, Assayas roots her strategic ambivalence towards debates over on-screen representation in Irma Vep as a poetic, mysterious character ‘qui n’est pas traversée par ces questions-là’.
Whiteness thus shapes Irma Vep's satire of industry discourse on representation as it intersects with performances of masculinity and femininity that find pleasure in the moral grey areas that such discourse would supposedly constrict. Although the miniseries opens its self-interested characters to mockery, they factor integrally into its melancholic nostalgia for the artistic values it attributes to Feuillade's original and to Musidora's Irma Vep. Mira in particular channels this melancholic nostalgia and marks the confluence of its effects: trading the previous remake's use of exoticised difference to destabilise national cinema for an archival impulse that roots transgression in French film history; grappling with Chinese femininity's haunting presence; and reaching back to a romanticised past insulated from representational politics.
Conclusion
This article examined the racialised and gendered ways the series Dix pour cent and Irma Vep portray French cinema. While both explicitly channel their commentary on le septième art through female icons, whiteness’ role therein remains unmarked. I have therefore traced how whiteness shapes DPC and Irma Vep's engagements with the industry's regimes of representation. DPC pokes fun at the archetypal femme française, yet nostalgically romanticises white, feminine embodiments of national cinema. Though the series envelops Sofia in such icons’ storylines, it does so in universalising ways that flatten racialised actresses’ intersectional obstacles. For its part, Irma Vep blends a racialised form of melancholic nostalgia with the search for lost cinematic magic. Where DPC's limited engagement with race reinforces French cinema's universalist self-image, Irma Vep complacently underscores its white characters’ insecurities and cynicism towards the politics of representation.
Both series offer windows into how whiteness is reiterated as the unmarked norm and how it conflates itself with a certain vision of French creative ideals – ones that embrace aesthetic complexity, moral ambiguity, and masculine, heterosexual desire. In both series’ microcosms of the industry, whiteness manifests through affects and positionings towards representational politics: nostalgia veering into melancholy, universalism, self-indulgence and pre-empted critique. In a moment when many voices rightly seek evolution in French cinema's self-narrative and representational possibilities, DPC and Irma Vep attest to reflexivity's ambivalences. Self-conscious techniques create space for both self-critique and self-reassuring yearnings for past ideals that hinder efforts to chart a path forward.
