Irma Vep

General

Genre
Cinema • Comedy

Duration
1:38

Additional information
Olivier Assayas | 1996 | France | 98 min | French with English subtitles

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 silent crime serial LES VAMPIRES. 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 Luna into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Assayas composes in IRMA VEP a witty critique of the nineties French film industry and the perennial tension between art and commercial entertainment. (Criterion)

Trailer