Irma Vep (1997)

That was an excellent one.

A Disappointing Continuation

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

As much a homage to Truffaut's "Day for Night" as it is to Feuillade's "Les Vampires", the movie within the movie that is being remade with Maggie Cheung playing herself as "Irma Vep" and, of course, no homage to Truffaut would be complete without Jean-Pierre Leaud, here cast as the director. It's great fun and a worthy addition to films about films though it makes me glad, for any fame or fortune it might have afforded me, I never ended up working in the industry which comes across here as an asylum that the inmates have taken over. Playing herself, Cheung is wonderfully self-effacing and director Olivier Assayas draws beautifully naturalistic performances from his entire cast. Never likely to achieve the international success of Truffaut's classic "Irma Vep" makes for a first-class cult movie.

I just watched Irma Vep last night. And I have to say that I enjoyed watching this movie for many reasons. Evidently Maggie is one of the reasons. Beautiful of course and good actress to boot. But beyond that, we have a lot of other things that kept my interest alive all along. This movie presents a self examination of French movie making, thereby justifying the accusation of "nombrilisme" (narcissism) by the reporter interviewing Maggy. This seems to be one of the themes here. A close look at the movie making process in France where a certain lack of coordination seems to be the rule, where a director launches the movie making only based on a whim. And in this case, it's the idea of having Maggie Cheung play the main role of a character in a remake of a 1915 silent movie. What really becomes interesting is the way she gets into the role and really becomes Irma. But I will leave you to discover how and when. At any rate, the movie has the funny effect to make you wonder if French movie making is in that bad a state that it can come up with such an interesting product.

Modern French cinema is far removed from the time when Louis Feuillade made his silent serial "Les Vampires". In 1915, the war had stifled the French film industry, as elsewhere, and thus the international dominance of Hollywood since. "Irma Vep", a film about filmmaking with all the self-reflexive jesting, owes more to the New Wave of several decades later.In it, a director plans to remake the nearly seven-hour long silent serial "Les Vampires", and he plans to remake it as a silent film, to boot. Casting a Hong Kong action star in the lead was the most rational decision he made. Here in lies the absurd humor of "Irma Vep". It's a clever idea, although a recycled one. I especially like the use of a silent serial, as I've seen many silent films (although I don't care for "Les Vampires" or serials in general). Anyhow, there are some good pokes at the modern French film industry; quibbles over the uncomfortable coexistence between commercial, popular movies (which would include "Les Vampires") and the artsy, government-funded ones (which would probably include "Irma Vep"); and French filmmaker stereotypes are exploited.The comicality is hit or miss, but that's not what I consider the film's major problem. I think the subplots (the lesbianism, personal affairs and such) detract from it. "Irma Vep" lacks focus, just as with the film within the film. The various story-lines and the film's style stray far from the path, but the problem is there doesn't seem to have been much of a path to begin with and, in the end, we get images from a completely unfocused mind.

This truly is a film for film elites. I really enjoy films about human relationships and films about social injustice. I don't enjoy uber-intellectual movies that discuss film-making in a way that can be understood by only a limited number of folks who are keyed into interpretions of art house films. This is not a film for a wide audience, though at best it makes the uninitiated curious. Overall, films made for a select few should be available to the select few only. The rest of us who stumble on it at our local video store sit for a painful 96 minutes waiting for the plot and story to congeal enough for us to understand what the heck it's all about. We come out empty-handed in the end. It is a waste and it isn't. I know what people are bitching about with regards to intellectual French films, but then again, I'm not sure if I really care.