''Irma Vep'' is a 1996 French

comedy-drama Comedy drama (also known by the portmanteau dramedy) is a hybrid genre of works that combine elements of comedy and Drama (film and television), drama. In film, as well as scripted television series, serious dramatic subjects (such as death, il ...

film written and directed by

Olivier Assayas Olivier Assayas (; born 25 January 1955) is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. Assayas is known for his eclectic filmography, consisting of slow-burning Period Piece Films, period pieces, psychological thrillers, neo-noirs, an ...

. Hong Kong actress

Maggie Cheung Maggie Cheung Man-yuk (; born 20 September 1964) is a Hong Kong actress. She is one of the most successful and internationally acclaimed actresses in Asia, renowned for her diverse and versatile performances as well as her natural acting skills ...

plays a fictionalised version of herself, as disasters result when an unstable French film director (played by

Jean-Pierre Léaud Jean-Pierre Léaud, ComM (; born 28 May 1944) is a French actor best known for being an important figure of the French New Wave and his portrayal of Antoine Doinel in a series of films by François Truffaut, beginning with '' The 400 Blows'' (19 ...

) attempts to remake

Louis Feuillade Louis Feuillade (; 19 February 1873 – 25 February 1925) was a French filmmaker of the silent film, silent era. Between 1906 and 1924, he directed over 630 films. He is primarily known for the crime serial film, serials ''Fantômas (1913 ser ...

's classic

silent film A silent film is a film without synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, w ...

serial ''

Les Vampires ''Les Vampires'' () is a 1915–1916 French Silent film, silent Crime film, crime serial film written and directed by Louis Feuillade. Set in Paris, it stars Édouard Mathé, Musidora and Marcel Lévesque. The main characters are a journalist an ...

'' (1915–16). (''Irma Vep'' is an anagram for the word ''"vampire"''.) Taking place largely through the eyes of a foreigner (Cheung), it is also a meditation on the state of the

French film industry The cinema of France comprises the film industry and its film productions, whether made within the nation of France or by French film production companies abroad. It is the oldest and largest precursor of national cinemas in Europe, with prima ...

. ''Irma Vep'' was screened in the

Un Certain Regard (; 'A Certain Glance') is a section of the Cannes Film Festival's official selection. It is run at the Debussy, parallel to the competition for the . This section was introduced in 1978 by Gilles Jacob. The section presents 20 films with unusua ...

section at the

1996 Cannes Film Festival The 49th Cannes Film Festival took place from 9 to 20 May 1996. American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola served as jury president for the main competition. Sabine Azéma hosted the opening and closing ceremonies. British filmmaker Mike Leigh wo ...

. It was released in France on 13 November 1996. In 2022, the film was reimagined as a miniseries for HBO, created by Assayas.

Plot

The plot mirrors the

disorientation Orientation is a function of the mind involving awareness of three dimensions: time, place and person. Problems with orientation lead to ''dis''orientation, and can be due to various conditions. It ranges from an inability to coherently understand ...

felt by director René Vidal during a troubled production of a film-within-a-film.

has been cast to play the film's

hero A hero (feminine: heroine) is a real person or fictional character who, in the face of danger, combats adversity through feats of ingenuity, courage, or Physical strength, strength. The original hero type of classical epics did such thin ...

ine, Irma Vep, a burglar and a spy, who dresses in a tight, black,

latex Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

rubber

catsuit A catsuit is a one-piece form-fitting garment that covers the torso and the legs, and frequently the arms. They are usually made from stretchable material, such as lycra, Chiffon (fabric), chiffon, spandex (after 1959), latex, or velour, but may u ...

. Irma Vep, it is explained, is an

anagram An anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once. For example, the word ''anagram'' itself can be rearranged into the phrase "nag a ram"; which ...

for ''

vampire A vampire is a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the Vitalism, vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead, undead humanoid creatures that often visited loved ones and c ...

'', but she is not a literal vampire. Rather, she is the inspiration for a criminal gang named The Vampires, as in Feuillade's original serial. René, the cast and crew view the film's

dailies In filmmaking, dailies or rushes are the raw, film editing, unedited footage shot during the making of a motion picture. The term "dailies" comes from when movies were all shot on film because usually at the end of each day, the footage was dev ...

and he angrily declares the footage terrible and soulless. After he storms out, everyone else quickly departs the facility, leaving Maggie stranded. She accepts an invitation from the costume designer, Zoé, to a group dinner with other crew members. There, Zoé confides to another woman that she is romantically interested in Maggie, which the woman then tells Maggie, embarrassing her. After the dinner with the other crew members, Maggie visits René at a hotel in the aftermath of a violent episode with his wife. René admits that he had mainly wanted to make the film because he desired to see her in it. Later that evening, Maggie, apparently possessed by her character, dons the catsuit and steals jewelry from a hotel suite while a nude woman argues on the phone with her boyfriend. She then throws away the jewelry. The next morning, Zoé picks an exhausted Maggie up from her hotel room. René is a no-show on the set, and the crew attempt to film without him. At the end of the day, imperious film director José Mirano meets Maggie's costar Laure at a bar and tells her René has had a breakdown and that he has been hired to complete the film. He firmly contends that a Chinese actress should not be playing Irma Vep, who he sees as an icon within French culture. José tells her he intends to replace Maggie with Laure. Zoé and Maggie take a taxi to a

rave A rave (from the verb: '' to rave'') is a dance party at a warehouse, club, or other public or private venue, typically featuring performances by DJs playing electronic dance music. The style is most associated with the early 1990s dance mus ...

, but Maggie declines to go at the last minute and departs in the taxi. Zoé, looking disappointed, walks through the crowd at the rave. José and the cast and crew gather at the screening facility to view the rushes that René has personally edited. Maggie is not there, however, and it is said that she has left for America to work on a film with

Ridley Scott Sir Ridley Scott (born 30 November 1937) is an English film director and producer. He directs films in the Science fiction film, science fiction, Crime film, crime, and historical drama, historical epic genres, with an atmospheric and highly co ...

. The film ends with the rushes, which have been cut into a hallucinatory montage with numerous scratches and other modifications being done to the film itself. The future of the production is not revealed.

Cast

Allusions to French film history

The film refers to iconic figures in French film history:

, Musidora, Arletty,

François Truffaut François Roland Truffaut ( , ; ; 6 February 1932 – 21 October 1984) was a French filmmaker, actor, and critic. He is widely regarded as one of the founders of the French New Wave. He came under the tutelage of film critic Andre Bazin as a ...

, the Groupe

SLON The Solovki special camp (later the Solovki special prison), was set up in 1923 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea as a remote and inaccessible place of detention, primarily intended for socialist opponents of Soviet Russia's new Bolshev ...

Alain Delon Alain Fabien Maurice Marcel Delon (; 8 November 1935 – 18 August 2024) was a French actor, film producer, screenwriter, singer, and businessman. Acknowledged as a cultural and cinematic leading man of the 20th century, Delon emerged as one of ...

, and

Catherine Deneuve Catherine Fabienne Dorléac (born 22 October 1943), known professionally as Catherine Deneuve (, , ), is a French actress. She is considered one of the greatest European actresses on film. In 2020, ''The New York Times'' ranked her as one of th ...

. Thematically, the film questions the place of French cinema at the time. According to Chris Darke, it is not a "mourning for cinema with the romantic nostalgia" but "more like the Mexican

Day of the Dead The Day of the Dead () is a holiday traditionally celebrated on November 1 and 2, though other days, such as October 31 or November 6, may be included depending on the locality. The multi-day holiday involves family and friends gathering to pa ...

: remembrance as an act of celebration". Furthermore, Dale Hudson of '' Screen'' wrote, "It is less a film about re-presenting the past, than it is a film about addressing the present, specifically the place of France within the global economy."

Production

The idea for the film was born out of an attempted collaboration among Assayas,

Claire Denis Claire Denis (; ; born 21 April 1946) is a French film director and screenwriter. Her feature film '' Beau Travail'' (1999) has been called one of the greatest films of the 1990s and of all time. Her work has dealt with themes of colonial and p ...

, and

Atom Egoyan Atom Egoyan (; ; born July 19, 1960) is an Armenian Canadians, Armenian-Canadian filmmaker. One of the most preeminent directors of the Toronto New Wave, he emerged during the 1980s and made his career breakthrough with ''Exotica (film), Exotica ...

, who wanted to experiment with the situation of a foreigner in Paris. In the 1915 original serial, written and directed by Louis Feuillade, Irma Vep was played by French

actress Musidora (1889–1957). Much of the film depicts set-related incidents that echo scenes in Truffaut's 1973 film '' Day for Night'', to which ''Irma Vep'' owes a large thematic debt. However, Assayas publicly stated that although he considers '' La nuit americaine'' a great film, it is more about the fantasy of filmmaking than the reality. Assayas credits as a greater inspiration

Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rainer Werner Fassbinder (; 31 May 1945 – 10 June 1982), sometimes credited as R. W. Fassbinder, was a German filmmaker, dramatist and actor. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures and catalysts of the New German Cinema moveme ...

's ''

Beware of a Holy Whore ''Beware of a Holy Whore'' () is a 1971 West German drama film written and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that features Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, Hanna Schygulla and Fassbinder himself. Fassbinder considered this to be his favorite of hi ...

'', in which Lou Castel, who plays the replacement director José Mirano in this film, plays a film director. Assayas wrote the script in ten weeks, and the film was shot in a month, with no retakes. "Its hasty production circumstances seem perilously close to the ones that cause everyone such grief in the film." Assayas married Cheung in 1998. They divorced in 2001. They again collaborated in 2004 on the film '' Clean''.

Reception

''Irma Vep'' received a positive critical response. On

Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...

, the film holds a rating of 94% based on 47 reviews with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Starring a bewitching Maggie Cheung, ''Irma Vep'' is an evocative and reflexive satire of the filmmaking process that is bursting at the seams with an affection for cinema." On

Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...

, it has a score of 80 out of 100 based on 21 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

References in other media

Lettrist footage from the film, along with shots from the original ''Les Vampires'', are used in White Ring's video for their single "IxC999". A character in the five-comic series "Anno Dracula – 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem" by

Kim Newman Kim James Newman (born 31 July 1959) is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. He is interested in film history and horror fiction – both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's ''Dracula'' at the age of eleven & ...

and Paul McCaffrey is based on Irma Vep.

Home media

''Irma Vep'' was released on Blu-ray and DVD through

The Criterion Collection The Criterion Collection, Inc. (or simply Criterion) is an American home video, home-video distribution company that focuses on licensing, restoring and distributing "important classic and contemporary films". A "sister company" of art film, arth ...

on 27 April 2021.

Television adaptation

HBO Home Box Office (HBO) is an American pay television service, which is the flagship property of namesake parent-subsidiary Home Box Office, Inc., itself a unit owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. The overall Home Box Office business unit is based a ...

produced a limited television series adaptation of the film that premiered at the

Cannes Film Festival The Cannes Film Festival (; ), until 2003 called the International Film Festival ('), is the most prestigious film festival in the world. Held in Cannes, France, it previews new films of all genres, including documentaries, from all around ...

on 22 May 2022, and was released on 6 June 2022 on HBO. It stars

Alicia Vikander Alicia Amanda Vikander (; ; born 3 October 1988) is a Swedish actress. List of awards and nominations received by Alicia Vikander, Her accolades include an Academy Award and nominations for two Golden Globe Awards and three British Academy Film ...

, Vincent Macaigne, Adria Arjona, Byron Bowers, Devon Ross,

Carrie Brownstein Carrie Rachel Brownstein (born September 27, 1974) is an American musician, actress, writer, director, and comedian. She first came to prominence as a member of the band Excuse 17 before forming the rock trio Sleater-Kinney. During a long hiatu ...

Tom Sturridge Thomas Sidney Jerome Sturridge (born 5 December 1985) is an English actor. His early films include '' Being Julia'' (2004), '' Like Minds'' (2006), and '' The Boat That Rocked'' (2009). He was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Pl ...

and Fala Chen and was written and directed by Assayas.

References

External links

* * * *
''Irma Vep: Film in Flux''
– an essay by Aliza Ma at

{{Olivier Assayas 1996 films 1996 comedy-drama films 1996 independent films 1990s English-language films 1990s French-language films 1996 multilingual films English-language French films Films about filmmaking Films adapted into television shows Films directed by Olivier Assayas French independent films Films with screenplays by Olivier Assayas French comedy-drama films French multilingual films 1990s French films English-language comedy-drama films English-language independent films