Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep is a clever, offbeat movie about the making of a movie. From the start, Assayas displays his delicious sense of irony by casting Francois Truffaut's screen alter ego, Jean Pierre Leaud as the director of the film within a film. Leaud plays Renee Vidal, a burnt out French new waver who's been asked to remake the silent crime serial Les Vampires for French television. Central to the project is the casting of Irma Vep, the raven-haired arch villainess of the scandalous 1915 serial. As one Frenchman puts it, Irma Vep simply is Paris. But Vidal impulsively casts Maggie Cheung, a sexy Asian star, as the French seductress. Vidal is convinced that Cheung is the modern incarnation of Vep after he sees her acrobatic performance in the Hong Kong actioner, Heroic Trio.
Cheung, who essentially plays herself, arrives in France ready to begin work. But the gracious and ever professional star finds herself ignored and left behind as the French crew engages in petty bickering, malicious gossip and supreme snobbism. Vidal gets so lost in his intellectual musings about the film that he collapses and he tries to convey his anxieties to the refreshingly sensible Cheung.
Vidal:
"I have this idea of you in this part..."
Cheung:
"That's desire and that's okay its what we make movies with."
If Truffaut's Day for Night was an affectionate valentine to the cinema then Assayas' Irma Vep is a strident wake up call. Vidal's doomed project comes to symbolize not only the fall of French cinema but also the decline of filmmaking in general. French cinema does, however, take the brunt of this satiric assault. And Assayas doesn't spare his countrymen either. He ridicules the French for their vanity, egotism, inefficiency and intellectual pretension. His venom, humor and self parody are best displayed in a scene where a French film critic condemns his native cinema as 'nombrilistic" or 'navel gazing.'
Critic: "It's boring cinema..."
Yet even as Assayas mourns the sad state of his industry, his film boldly announces its rebirth. Shot in four weeks on a tiny budget, it recaptures the energy, wit and rebellion of the French new wave and gives it a new twist. Vidal rants at his pathetic image of an image and descends into madness but not Assayas. He creates an intoxicating flight of fancy in which Cheung tries to connect with her character by donning her black latex costume and slinking through her Paris hotel, spying on guests and stealing their jewelry. In this late night escapade, Assayas' film achieves what Vidal's movie only aspired to-- a modern variation of & 'les vampires.' and Assayas saves his frenzied display of modern cinematic magic for the films end. In a rough-cut sequence that could either be the cause or the product of Vidal's madness, we see images that literally dance across the screen in a kinetic display of cinematic poetry.
The luminous center of Assayas' film is Maggie Cheung. As refreshingly unaffected as the cinema of her native Hong Kong, Cheung is a delight. She seems baffled by the anxieties and politicking of the French crew and her innocence allows her to float above the chaos.
Irma Vep is a film best enjoyed by movie junkies but Assayas' wit and brash artistry should also appeal to anyone who loves good cinema.
