Irma Vep [VHS] [1997]

 

 

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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 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.

I feel downright churlish for not going completely crazy for this funny/sad look at movie-making -- specifically the rather absurd, doomed remaking of a real French classic, by an aging, out of style art-house director, starring Hong Kong action heroine Maggie Chung, who plays herself delightfully.

I enjoyed the film; its sort of a complex 1990s `Day for Night', with a paradoxical and sometimes confusing point of view about the nature of art and the state of film.

But I couldn't see it for the masterpiece a number of intelligent critics gave it credit for being. Jonathan Rosenbaum, the terrific critic from the Chicago Reader wrote a very long, in depth analysis that went right over my head, and then added insult to injury by implying that people who don't see the film as
a deep investigation of the evils of capitalism, and the meaning of ART are somehow shallow.

I'm also surprised by the number of people who take the ramblings of an obnoxious reporter in the film about the death of French art cinema as being the film's point of view on these issues. To me the film isn't taking sides, and seems to be gently satirizing, and yet embracing all of film.

Good natured, well acted, and brave (but also occasionally obscure) I quite enjoyed this and it did provoke some thinking. But I couldn't see it as the super deep film some did. For me, it was fun romp, but the ideas are less deep or radical then critics seem to want to give them credit for being.

Irma Vep is a 16mm movie about making a movie, like its cumbersome predecessors, 8½. of Fellini and La nuit américaine of Truffaut.
But against the above mentioned movies, it is self-sufficient simple, exploding the script in few main outlines.
Irma Vep should be considered a little jewel and a truth film about cinema.
A disorientated Hong Kong actress (Maggie Cheung), recruited to play the main role in a new edition of a 20's Louis Feuillade's mute film, faces the chaos of a French film production and becomes not long after, due to her grace and her attitude to compare herself with others, the hinge around are explored the inmost and close relationships between the prime actress and the film director, an eccentric costumier and the whole film cast.
The director, René Vidal, is interpreted by Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut's leading star, as an explicit reference to Nouvelle Vague.
Irma Vep is also a token excursion into cinema that starts with the pioneeristic and evocative mute movies; looks at the the emerging Asiatic scenario as new source of inspiration for the west school; quotes affectionately the outmoded social inspired movies; settles accounts with the special effects and the muscle structure of American new style of making films, against the serious and intellectual French one, toughly in search of new evolutions; ends with an unexpected brainwave film solution, like an homage to the experimental cinema, a ransom for the poor Vidal and perhaps a possible way of innovation for the French old-style art of cinema.
Sonic Youth's music is the sound-track for the topic upsetting scene in which Maggie transforms herself into a Vampire.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Unintelligible dialogue in English
A disappointing film: the parts in English, of which there are a lot, are in such broken English that, at times, to be unintellible. Read more

Published on 12 Oct 2008 by Bluebell

4.0 out of 5 stars Too glad...
.. this strange little piece of french cinema is finally available again. And at a very reasonable price. The only downer is, that you cannot turn off the subtitles. Read more

Published on 11 Sep 2008 by coma

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