Irma Vep: Olivier Assayas

Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep is a film about an actress who gets pulled into a country she doesn't quite understand to act in a film she can't fathom surrounded by people who don't speak her language. Here, that woman is Maggie Cheung playing herself as she is cast to play the legendary Irma Vep in an ill-conceived, ill-fated remake of Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires (1915). The film is about her own disorientation, but also the disintegration of a French cinema that has ossified within its own pretensions and jealousies of larger budgeted American films and more visually kinetic and exciting Hong Kong films--it's perhaps no coincidence that the director, played by Jean-Pierre Léaud, obsesses over Cheung's martial arts films and Hollywood blockbusters like Batman Returns (1992) while guzzling liter bottles of Coca-Cola. But for the most part, the film feels unfocused, sparing one brilliant moment where Cheung seems to become Irma Vep and does a little impromptu cat-burglarizing of her own. It reminds me of her struggles with the boundaries between actor, character, and historical figure in Stanley Kwan's Centre Stage (1992).

7/10