Slideshow
IRMA VEP
U.S., 1996
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard
Approx. 96 min. DCP.
Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung stars as herself in Olivier Assayas’ witty fast-paced romp through contemporary French filmmaking. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays the temperamental, over-the-hill New Wave director who casts her in his remake of the Feuillade classic LES VAMPIRES — as the glamorous leader of a cat burglar ring which terrorizes and fascinates Paris. Maggie looks great in latex, but the production is beset with problems, internecine backbiting, and rampant theorizing about the state of French film. It’s a ‘90s update of Truffaut’s DAY FOR NIGHT, or maybe the Gallic version of LIVING IN OBLIVION. Either way it all happens faster than you can say “un croissant et un café au lait, si vous plaît.”
Reviews
“IRMA VEP is about the way we cling to the memory of watching, about the way moving pictures move, the way they hold light and reflect it back, the way they steal from us when we're not looking — and also when we are.”
– Stephanie Zacharek, The New York Times
“What emerges is not only a memorable look at contemporary life in general (and international low-budget filmmaking in particular), but also a mysterious set of notations on how Feuillade’s hallucinatory masterwork might be translated into modern terms.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
“A true torchbearer of the French New Wave—playful, restless, full of invention, and born of an overwhelming discontent for the status quo. At a time of artistic crisis, when French cinema was in danger of losing its identity to popular American imports, Assayas issued IRMA VEP as a wake-up call to an industry that was slipping into compromise and irrelevance.”
– Scott Tobias, A.V. Club