Movie Club: Irma Vep
September 4, 2024
Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915 crime serial Les vampires.
Introduced by Social Media Manager Shelby Smout.
What she finds is a behind-the-scenes tangle of barely controlled chaos as egos clash, romantic attractions simmer, and an obsessive director (a cannily cast Jean-Pierre Léaud) drives himself to the brink to realize his vision. Blending blasts of silent cinema, martial arts flicks, and the music of Sonic Youth and Ali Farka Touré into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Assayas composes a witty reflection on the nineties French film industry and the eternal tension between art and commercial entertainment.
- Director: Olivier Assayas
- Principal Cast: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard, Antoine Basler
- Country: France
- Year: 1996
- Running Time: 99 min.
- Producer: Georges Benayoun
- Screenplay: Olivier Assayas
- Cinematographers: Eric Gautier
- Editors: Luc Barnier
- Music: Philippe Richard
- Language: French
- Has Subtitles: Yes
- US Distributor: Zeitgeist Films