Irma Vep "Essential Edition" DVD Review

Olivier Assayas does not get enough love on this side of the ocean. Many of his French language films remain undistributed on DVD or, in the case of his English language efforts, such as Clean, Demonlover and Boarding Gate, are largely ignored. So it is very nice to see this ‘Essential Edition’ of Irma Vep, Assayas love-letter to Maggie Cheung and loathe-letter to the foibles of French cinema get the 'Criterion'-level treatment from Zeitgeist Films.

The film opens with a very disorganized production house in the process of mounting a remake of the iconic silent French serial Les Vampires. The lengthy opening shot follows a prop gun being passed around from desk to desk - a pretty obvious metaphor for how on edge things are; with accompanying dialogue such as “I know a decision has been made, but I’m not sure what.” There have been hundreds of movies made about making movies. Some are good (The Player). Some are bad (I Love Your Work). Irma Vep is one of the best (easily in the league of Robert Altman) due it its wild-card: Maggie Cheung playing herself. A Chinese actress dumped into the middle of the chaos, brought in by the eccentric director Renee Vidal (played by French New Wave regular Jean-Pierre Léaud) who seems to be oblivious to everything except for the fact that Les Vampires cannot be remade with a French actress ("Musidora is irreplaceable"). It is no small irony considering Vidal wants Cheung after seeing Heroic Trio, the 'light bulb moment' scene is in fact done almost entirely by the actresses stunt double. Cheung arrives in Paris speaking only a little French (in real life, she is fluent), yet is game to go along with things and brings a warmth into the stress of on-set politics and the usual turmoils of collaborative art. It is interesting that in most films when actors play themselves in films, the performance often plays as melancholic parody (John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich, Alfred Molina in Coffee & Cigarettes, or Jean Claude Van Damme in JCVD), yet here Maggie is all innocence and charm. The value of this balancing out the savage satire raises the effect of Irma Vep immeasurably.

And so goes another disastrous attempt at remaking something that was of its place and time. Assayas certainly has a fair bit of commentary on the state of French and Hollywood cinema organically inserted into the film. For instance, the costume for Vep is designed to evoke Tim Burton's Catwoman crossed with hooker. This is done most overtly during an on-set interview with Maggie Cheung where French journalist gets to explicitly state how he feels about the state of art-cinema being the dominant form in France (Friends giving friends money to make things the public doesn’t want). Not really letting Cheung get an (English) word in edgewise, the journalist laments on the lack of French films in the style of John Woo or Jean Claude Van Damme. Is this a stand in for Assayas, or self-deprecation? I would be very curious to see what his thoughts would be regarding the current crop of hard-core and commercial French horror flicks from the likes of Alexandre Aja, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury or Pascal Laugier. The satirical barbs almost always the bullseye. As the directorial duties fall from Léaud’s director having a nervous breakdown to another director who takes over the project from his friend because his welfare is running out. Yet there are many layers here, some quite esoteric. At a late night party, some of the crew and assistant directors, including the costume designer who has a serious crush on Maggie, commiserate that all this money is being spent on remakes instead of the original or political pictures of yesteryear; yet these hipsters and artists are listening at the time to a Luna cover of Serge Gainsbourg's Bonnie and Clyde (a remake of a French song appropriating Hollywood iconography). Even more baffling is the presence Atom Egoyan’s wife, Arsinée Khanjian, who cameos nude as a woman in a hotel stranded by her husband. In the films signature scene, she is robbed during the films signature scene by Maggie Cheung testing out her costume in a fit of method acting catburgling the hotel patrons like Irma Vep herself. Never has Cheung looked more sexy than in a tight fitting latex suit (purchased from a sex shop) with Sonic Youth blaring in the background. Yet Assayas has a bit of a chuckle by emphasizing the awkward squeaking and stretching made by the tight fighting material as she slinks around the corridors of the Parisian hotel.

One thing in common with many of Olivier Assayas’ films is the bumping of cultures and languages in the jet-hopping global stew of a modern world. Maggie Cheung the actress, fluent in several languages and working in films all over the world, is a choice so representative of his usual themes, that the director when and married the actress shortly after the films release. Irma Vep mixes in cultural appropriation, recycling of icons and even some sexual confusion into the mix to form one of the most satisfying satires in years, a decade or more ahead of its 1996 release (meaning that things have gotten much worse!). Despite a growing cult following (who should be eager to get this fully loaded disc), Irma Vep (and Maggie Cheung for that matter) deserves much further penetration into the western mainstream.