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May 11, 2021 Web Exclusive By Ed McMenamin

Irma Vep opens in a chaotic film studio office in Paris. The frenetic camera moves from desk to desk as employees trade conversation like a baton in a relay race. One producer argues about royalties, an assistant waves a prop handgun in the air, and Hong Kong movie star Maggie Cheung, playing herself, quietly enters the mayhem.

Cheung is in Paris to star in a remake of the 1916 French silent classic Les Vampires, playing the iconic role of Irma Vep, the slinky ringleader of an underworld criminal gang.

The dysfunctional office portends the rocky film production that follows. The director of the film within a film, René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), is edging toward a nervous breakdown, and his best work is behind him, but Cheung’s grace and ballet-like movement in Hong Kong action films has revitalized his creative spirit.

Irma Vep is French director Olivier Assayas’ 1996 breakthrough film — a vital and personal work that slips easy definition. It honors classic French cinema and criticizes the insular nature of modern French film. It takes a swing at Hollywood’s bombastic and obliterating effect on audience tastes, and it champions international cinema as the future. In effect, it simultaneously stands alongside the best French filmmaking from the 1990s — like Clair Denis’ Beau Travail — and Wong Kar-wai’s visceral and stylish revelations from the same decade.

Playful dialogue addresses the tension between commerce and art directly, but no character appears as Assayas’ direct mouthpiece. His own opinions appear obliquely, delivered visually and most profoundly in the film’s surprising, experimental ending.

Early scenes often take a comedic, colorful rhythm, before the tonal shifts in the third act.

“I don’t like American films,” costume designer Zoé (Nathalie Richard) tells Cheung in a conversation about Batman Returns. “I think everything is too much decoration, too much money.”

Later, a journalist grills Cheung over the fictional director Vidal’s films. She gives a polite answer – his films weren’t shown at all in Hong Kong, but she watched them on video, despite not speaking the language. The journalist retorts that French cinema is navel-gazing, made by directors for themselves and not for audiences. He prefers American action films – Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude van Damme – and the “bullet ballet” of Hong Kong director John Woo.

Assayas’ own taste likely incorporates fragments of both extreme viewpoints, weighted heavily toward Zoé’s perspective, while he appreciates Irma Vep’s legacy in the threat and temptation of Batman Returns’ Catwoman. All meaningful art reverberates through time and space, uncontrolled, transcending its original meaning, and Irma Vep is “like a ghost that has been invoked as in a magical ritual and never left,” Assayas says in the new Criterion Blu-ray edition special feature.

As both herself and as Irma Vep, Cheung is the captivating eye of the storm, serving as the inspiration for both the director of the film within the film, and for Assayas himself. The movie is about the challenges and potential of cinema, as well as Assayas’ love for Cheung, whom he would marry two years later.

Her form-fitting latex catsuit also draws Zoé’s romantic attention, creating more tension on set, and the costume appears to stir an inner awakening within Cheung herself. As the fictional film’s production crumbles under the weight of clashing egos and outsized personalities, Cheung brings the costume home to her hotel, and falls into fantasy. She prowls a hallway in the catsuit, propelled by the writhing, intertwining guitars of Sonic Youth’s “Tunic (Song for Karen).” She sneaks into a neighbor’s room, spies an undressed woman and steals her necklace.

Cheung, for a moment, actually becomes Irma Vep. The lines between fiction and reality dissolve. The audience, if it’s lucky, suspends disbelief, embraces the fantasy, and cinema transcends the two-dimensional boundary of the screen.

Criterion knocks it out of the park with the new two-disc, director-approved Blu-ray edition. It features a new interview filmed with Assayas for the release; Les Vampires: Hypnotic Eyes – the sixth episode in Louis Feuillade’s silent-film serial from 1916, and several featurettes, short films and interviews with the cast and crew.

(www.criterion.com/films/29197-irma-vep)

Follow Ed McMenamin on twitter at @edmcmenamin