Until it didn’t. A Chinese movie actress, in France to star in a remake of "Les Vampires", finds petty intrigues and clashing egos on the set.
Handlung. If you haven’t seen Irma Vep, the Criterion Channel has you covered. But then — just when Vidal is starting to lose it and his “Les Vampires” seems like it will implode along with him — she enters a kind of fugue state where she’s possessed by the thieving spirit of Irma Vep herself.Dressed in the character’s black catsuit, she sneaks into a hotel room door the corridor from hers, hides from the naked and preoccupied woman inside, and steals an eye-popping diamond necklace. 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. Vidal picked a Chinese actress to play Irma Vep because he was struck by the physicality of her screen presence in Hong Kong action movies (globalism and modernity always being at the root of Assayas’ interests, and Cheung being his future ex-wife), but upon meeting his star, Vidal is instantly paralyzed by the recognition that he’d be wasting her talent on a role that already belongs to someone else. It’s as sleek a sequence as Assayas has ever directed; erotic and tense and inflected with the kind of cinematic flourishes (midnight lighting, movie smoke, sheets of fake rain) that are missing from the rest of the film. For one thing, he’s coming off his first outright dud since “A New Life,” as the Cuba-set thriller “Wasp Network” The international market has been so poisoned by populism that content has supplanted art and Disney tentpoles are the only movies that can turn a reliable profit. Dashboard; Orders; Wish List; My Collection; Log In; Menu Close Menu. Assayas has shown us flashes of Vidal’s movie at several junctures throughout “Irma Vep” in order to help blur the boundaries between film history and meta-fiction, but now we’re treated to three uninterrupted minutes of edited assembly.The results are… unexpected. In his own words, Assayas has said that “the central question of ‘Irma Vep’ is: ‘How can you go back to the original, virginal strength of cinema?’” The film is so much fun (and so enduringly relevant) because it answers that question in ways that would seem contradictory if not for how the movie synthesizes them all together.Cheung spends most of the movie rubbernecking at the production chaos from the sidelines. Filter Sort Direction. With cinema at a complete standstill for the first time in its history, further complicating a medium that was already stuck at a crossroads between its mythic past and uncertain future, Irma Vep might just be the hero we need right now. Why It Belongs in the Collection: The case for Irma Vep coming to The Criterion Collection is kind of open and shut. Irma Vep Olivier Assayas France , 1996 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 . Irma Vep is “on the surface, your basic backstage drama,” wrote Nick Pinkerton in the Village Voice in 2010. Irma Vep. And while he may now be more of the old guard than the vanguard, the 65-year-old Frenchman still has a finger on the pulse like few people ever will; whether dipping back into autobiography or exploring the way that It’s too early to say for sure if the TV show will be an expanded retelling of “Irma Vep” or if it will acknowledge the existence of the 1996 movie as directly as the 1996 movie acknowledged “Les Vampires,” but it’s a hard to imagine how Assayas could ever resist the temptation of the latter approach — how he could deny himself the opportunity to wrestle with his ambitions while also trying to outwit his own shadow. Classics and discoveries from around the world, thematically programmed with special features, on a streaming service brought to you by the Criterion Collection.
All rights reserved. He emerged from the project with a fresh and intuitive sense of how to pursue his own cinema, and while the movie may not have caused a measurable sea change in the industry around it, he has found enough support to follow his muse ever since.But now, despite how much the world has changed, Assayas finds himself in a similar situation as he did before Vidal sublimated himself into the final scenes of “Irma Vep” some 24 years ago. Account. “You are more important than the character,” he wheezes at Cheung during a moment of complete desolation. It allows Cheung to solve Vidal’s problem and fully become her own version of Irma Vep — liberating the iconic character from the strictures of a national cinema that had held it hostage for almost 100 years — but only because the director’s camera wasn’t there to see it.It’s only after Vidal hits bottom and completely loses faith in himself that he’s able to find a solution of his own.