2/4  Irma Vep = Vampire
Maggie Cheung is an excellent actress and Olivier Assayas is an excellent director and the plot is interesting, so what went wrong to make this a blah boring movie? I don't know. The part I remember most distinctly is when they're looking ... (read full)

3/5 Maggie Cheung, the muse
  by Reader (Boca Raton, FL)
Very modern and very French comedy about filmmaking, art and everyone else involved in the process. Maggie Cheung arrives to Paris from Hong Kong in order to create her first "art" movie. Her past acting experiences featured her athletic abilities in martial arts movies. Her casting in the French director's remake of the silent movie about vampires is her chance to break the mold and casting stereotype.

Just observing the fuss and lack of organization of the film's crew is funny in itself. What adds to the comedic feel is the cultural and language divide. But the best part is watching Maggie in her black latex catsuit that makes the funniest little noises one can expect from the action figure "cat woman" bomb shell. The obsession with Maggie's beauty is shared between the director and her costume designer. When the original director goes through a nervous breakdown there is a change of guard and the enthusiasm for Maggie seems to disappear overnight.

This is definitely not a movie for everyone. One must enjoy european cinema to get through this film. But what I really liked about the movie is the soundtrack. Some very, very French music and singing is what makes this film easier to tolerate.

4/5 Irma Vep or Eerma Wep? Who cares in this friendly, eccentric movie about making a movie?
  by C. O. DeRiemer (San Antonio, Texas, USA)
What the world needs is a movie about producing a book. You know, the creative angst of the author as he tries to remember when to use "which" and when to use "that," the nasty arguments over choosing a typeface, the dust jacket tantrums about artistic integrity if both boobs are shown or just one, the cattiness of the editors and, perhaps most insightful, whether the proofreading will continue to be the night guard's responsibility during his dinner break or whether the delivery boy from the next door deli should be given a crack at it.

Until that movie is made, Irma Vep will have to do. Please note that elements of the plot are discussed but there are absolutely no spoilers here or in the movie. Irma Vep is a movie about making a movie and it's stuffed with angst, pettiness, tantrums, ego and confusion. Taken on one of its own terms -- is it any good just as a movie -- the answer in my opinion is a loud "yes." Forget all the inside cineaste stuff (it is French, after all) and you may find that Irma Vep is funny, not just clever. It's good-natured with a friendly performance by Hong Kong kung fu heroine Maggie Cheung playing herself. Most of all, it is so eccentric a movie I seldom could stop smiling.

Rene Vidal (Jean-Pierre Leaud), an aging New Wave director now well past his sell-by date, is planning a comeback. He'll re-make a long, long and long ago silent movie called Les Vampires, a movie about a gang of criminals who prowl and stalk. One of them, in a skin-tight black body suit and black mask, is named Irma Vep. She will be Vidal's inspiration. He has just the star in mind to play Irma...Maggie Cheung. Maggie, who doesn't speak French, shows up in Paris ready to work. Cast and crew snipe and argue in many mini-dramas. Vidal collapses. Cast and crew snipe and argue some more. Maggie, an outsider and quite taken by the black latex outfit she and the costume designer, Zoe (Nathalie Richard) picked up cheap at a Parisian sex shop, whiles away the time one night by creeping about her hotel wearing the suit. Like Irma Vep, Maggie sees things in the hallways and rooms, some worth taking, and then there is the nighttime rain and the high, outside fire escape leading up to the hotel's roof. All does not go well for the movie. Eventually Maggie leaves for New York to take a meeting with Ridley Scott.

Not much there, I know, except for director and writer Olivier Assayas' amusing style and Maggie Cheung's bemusement and lithe creeping. There is much pleasure in Assayas' take on movie making and movie people, but the pleasure for me comes from noticing how I came to rather enjoy and like all those behind-the-scenes groupies, workers and jerks. The dish, of course, is amusing. "Directors thrive on hypocrisy," says one. "Yeah," says another, "but sometimes they go overboard." The interview between Maggie and a young, intense film enthusiast is priceless...John Woo versus Jean-Luc Godard. The film enthusiast has strong opinions about both. Maggie doesn't.

Maggie Cheung gives a sweet center to this movie, but I liked just as much Nathalie Richard as Zoe, the lean, blonde, tentative, cigarette-smoking, girl-liking costume designer. She's past her prime if you're a teenage boy, but right at her peak if you're an adult of either sex.

Film lovers might enjoy one message. "Cinema is not magic. It's a technique and a science. A technique born of science and at the service of a will, the will of the workers to free themselves." Got that? Essayas manages to combine the idea of movies (popular entertainment) and film (a much more deadly serious concept of the movies) in a way that is eccentric and engaging. Film insiders and hopeful film insiders just might love this movie. Yet as funny and eccentric as Eerma Wep is, it's still just a movie by a talented director about making a movie. If you like movies and are relaxed about "film," I think you'll enjoy it.

This DVD issue by Zeitgeist has a very good picture.

3/5 The last half is great. The first half, not so much.
  by Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

Assayas' homage to Contempt gets very interesting about an hour into the film, when we find out that Maggie Cheung (playing herself) is not all she seems. From there, it is riveting. Unfortunately, however, getting to that point may be something of a chore.

The plot: washed-up director Rene Vidal (Jean-Pierre Leaud) is hoping to revitalize his career by remaking Feuillade's classic serial Les Vampires. He casts Cheung, who speaks no French, in the title role, leading to a comedy of errors on the set. Costumer Zoe (Code Inconnu's Nathalie Richard), who is in lust with Cheung, quickly becomes her best friend and staunchest defender on the set, and much is made of the subplot of whether the two will get together. Much of the rest of the tension in the film comes from trying to figure out whether Vidal, who's getting more and more haggard as the shooting drags on, will be able to complete the film without having a breakdown.

The first hour of the film is desperately meta, aping the French New Wave whilst simultaneously paying it homage (and who better here than Jean-Pierre Leaud, who may have been involved in more universally-lauded French films than any other living actor?); all that's missing is Jean-Pierre Melville, but even his infamous and wonderful interview in Breathless is quite nicely aped by Cheung and an antagonist reporter (Antoine Basler). Still, if meta doesn't appeal to you, you're going to have a tough time with it. That said, once it takes off, it really takes off, and the final scenes of the film, when the cast and crew screen what Vidal has put together, are absolute genius. That movie I'd have paid good money to see. ***


3/5 Almost a really cool movie
  by Doran Steele
Irma Vep is a fictional behind-the-scenes film. Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung stars as Maggie Cheung, a Hong Kong actress starring in a French remake of an old silent film. The most interesting dynamic of this film are the interaction and tensions between these multiple layers. Cheung's character starts to have trouble differentiating between the role that she plays and reality. The director of the fictional French film chose the fictional Cheung because her previous Hong Kong work recommends her for the part; viewers of the film Irma Vep will also be influenced in what they think of the character because of films of the real-life Maggie Cheung (Super Cop) that they have presumably seen.

The main tension of the plot revolves around four main plot threads: the character Maggie Cheung seems to get too much into her Vampire-like cat burglar character, the formerly-great French director of the film seems to be going through a personal crisis and perhaps even a nervous breakdown, the rest of the crew--especially the assistant director--have trouble understanding the director's vision and the casting of Cheung in the lead role, and the costume director has a secret crush on Cheung. Irma Vep is an entertaining film about a film production that is in the process of unraveling under the strain of all of these tensions.

The film is interesting, but there are problems in the execution. I would have liked to have seen more of an exploration of the plot threads that I described above. The film sets up interesting situations, but then leaves the viewer dangling. In one scene the Maggie Cheung character tries out an act of burglary, but how does that relate to everything else going on in the film? Is it simply a case of Cheung getting too much into character or does this have something to do with Cheung's strange reluctance to talk about her previous film production which apparently also suffered problems? The lesbian crush subplot doesn't really go anywhere--after watching the costume designer's crush on Cheung throughout the film, this culminates in Cheung's embarassed giggling when she finds out about the crush. There seems to be some kind parallel between the ways that the Cheung character is magnetically attractive both to the costume designer and the director--maybe this even has something to do with the vampire-like attributes of the character that Cheung's character is playing, but again the film makers hint at this without developing it.

Overall I enjoyed the film. The open nature of the script allows different viewers to see different things. I can appreciate this, but I guess I would have like to have seen more of how these interesting situations played out rather than just settling for an interesting setup where the viewer can imagine what it means and where it will go.

4/5 Sonic Youth and old, yet as young as all outdoors.
  by redbank2 (Red Bank, NJ)
Hey, not only does this flic(no, not a french policeman), have great music, it also, sorta like ontology recapitulates teleology, is sorta like a 'Day for Night' but brought many years forward and never stops... At least Francois Truffaut kept it within 'soap opera' parameters. This flic leaves us with no boundaries, and yet Maggie is so appealing, why was she not nominated in les academie americain for this?... And yet Miss Kim Gordon, wow, with the song Tunic, exhilarates, and Serge and Brigitte Bardot, as they say, bring it all home with 'Bonnie and Clyde'...Zwei mal...Tschuss...