Irma Vep

French director Jean-Pierre Léaud decides to remake Feuillade's silent serial LES VAMPIRES as a modern feature. He decides to cast Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep based on seeing her in one movie in Marrakesh. When the movie opens, Miss Cheung has just arrived at Léaud's office in the last throes of pre-production, whence she is whisked away to a sex shop to buy a gimp suit to be modified for her costume. After that, things become chaotic, with spoiled takes, spoiled tempers and journalists who lecture her on how to make films.

Miss Cheung is wonderful in the role, a sweet-faced, slightly puzzled woman stranded alone in Paris, trying to perform her part in her first international production, while chaos swirls about her.

There is a lovely, impromptu feel about Olivier Assayas' movie. It feels as if he started out trying to do the remake, and as that became impossible, switched to a different film. That seems unlikely. Undoubtedly that was the look and feel he was trying for. The result is an amusing, slightly tentative effort that makes me wish to look at LES VAMPIRES again.

This is a very solid film, make no mistake, but it tends to play more like a testing ground for various elements of Olivier Assayas' overall style, particularly those which he would later explore more fully in his later masterpiece "Demonlover", than any sort of cohesive narrative statement. It's not very often that a film strikes me as not having enough of a plot, but in the case of this there did seem to be a certain irrelevance to it all. There's nothing really new about the "making a movie" movie, and this doesn't add much to the mix, although i do think it is well done for what it is, and occasionally even approaches a sort of proto-"Lost in Translation", with Paris standing in for Tokyo and Maggie Cheung's Asian "otherness" replacing Bill Murray's fish-out-of-water Americanness. But the film is never really focused enough to compare in any significant way to that film. "Irma Vep" really only comes alive when Assayas gets away from his nagging tendency towards a certain French talkiness and indulges in the moments of pure visual cinema that make up the other half of his general approach (and which seem to be invested with much more enthusiasm here) , such as the scene scored to Sonic Youth's "Tunic" (another foreshadowing of "Demonlover"). Certainly he does have a way with capturing pretty little images of neon lights reflecting through car windows and things like that, enough that I can acknowledge he is definitely a talented filmmaker, but within this film he never quite finds the correct way to integrate his little artistic flourishes into the whole, and overall the film feels more like a collection of separate ideas than a cohesive statement of any kind.

I just watched Irma Vep last night. And I have to say that I enjoyed watching this movie for many reasons. Evidently Maggie is one of the reasons. Beautiful of course and good actress to boot. But beyond that, we have a lot of other things that kept my interest alive all along. This movie presents a self examination of French movie making, thereby justifying the accusation of "nombrilisme" (narcissism) by the reporter interviewing Maggy. This seems to be one of the themes here. A close look at the movie making process in France where a certain lack of coordination seems to be the rule, where a director launches the movie making only based on a whim. And in this case, it's the idea of having Maggie Cheung play the main role of a character in a remake of a 1915 silent movie. What really becomes interesting is the way she gets into the role and really becomes Irma. But I will leave you to discover how and when. At any rate, the movie has the funny effect to make you wonder if French movie making is in that bad a state that it can come up with such an interesting product.

Maggie Cheung or not, I didn't expect much out of this film. But I was quite pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. For one, to get someone to play themselves in a lead role in a fictional film (Jackie Chan films and Roy Rogers aside;) is usually a risky thing to do. But Cheung fits in beautifully, and is so charming that she is obviously perfectly cast.

The film is in English and French, and even though the French is subtitled, I think it's easier to get caught up in the flow of the film if you understand both (I'm fluent in French and didn't have a problem, but I can see where it might be overly distracting). Some scenes seemed particularly important for one to be constantly looking away from the action, so to speak.

The film was a little long, and some scenes probably could have been cut down or cut altogether, but it gives a good view into French film-making, especially the snobbish elitism that is apparently common in more intellectual/artistic film circles. It's hysterically funny at some points, and the characterization of the different crew members is brilliantly portrayed.

I especially loved the scene where Maggie Cheung gets into characters by actually prowling around as a cat burglar (though she throws away her booty;)

Overall: a tight, well done film. It drags just a bit at points, but strong acting and strong writing help to overcome such lags. A pleasant surprise and a fun film! 8/10.

Pretty much average. Except for Maggie. The movie tries to tell us of the pretensions that the French movies have but falls its self prey to the illness that the script attributes to French cinema: boringness and a desire to intellectualism. I don't think the movie really achieves in making its point. If anything, it doesn't have the wide appeal that it says French movies should have. On the other hand, the movie isn't all that bad. In fact, Maggie looks absolutely fabulous, having a natural look that she doesn't have in HK movies, and she seems to revel in the very realistic banter that goes on between her costume designer and herself.

Did I mention that Maggie looks fabulous?