The live-wire international breakthrough of Olivier Assayas 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 a witty critique of the nineties French film industry and the eternal tension between art and commercial entertainment.
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- New interview with Olivier Assayas
- On the Set of “Irma Vep,” a behind-the-scenes featurette
- Interview from 2003 with Olivier Assayas and critic Charles Tesson
- Interview from 2003 with actors Maggie Cheung and Nathalie Richard
- Musidora, the Tenth Muse (2013), a documentary on the actor who originated the role of Irma Vep
- Les vampires: Hypnotic Eyes (1916), the sixth episode in Louis Feuillade’s silent-film serial
- Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung, a 1997 short film by Assayas
- Black-and-white rushes for the film
- An essay by critic Aliza Ma