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Review: 'Irma Vep' puts stake in the heart of current cinema
June 12, 1997
Web posted at: 1:43 p.m. EDT (1743 GMT)From Reviewer Paul Tatara
(CNN) -- French director Olivier Assayas' "Irma Vep" is not just a movie about making movies; it's a movie about how dismal the movies are that manage to get themselves made nowadays. If you followed that sentence, and if you've ever read one of my tantrums on that very topic, you've probably already guessed that I really enjoyed "Irma Vep." I will, however, be the first to admit that it's not for everybody.
A little bit of film history is required to get the complete gist of what's going on here. In the late 1950s, a group of French film critics, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard among them, decided that enough was enough. They had grown weary of the tired formalism in French cinema, and, along with such brilliant contemporaries as Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, decided to basically throw away the rule book and start all over again. They became directors, and their new storytelling technique, a raw style that (for our purposes) could best be described as an elegant primitivism, came to be known as the French New Wave. This was a historic development in the art of cinema, the great re-awakening of a periodically slumbering giant.
The ripples of the New Wave are sometimes still felt in the films of the 1990s (Quentin Tarantino, for instance, likes to pat himself on the back for making New Wave films, which he does not), but what Assayas seems to be suggesting with "Irma Vep" is that formalism has taken over again ... and this new formalism is more void of charm or dignity than ever before. That's not all, though. Before it's all over, Assayas even takes one or two shots at the New Wavers themselves. There's no pleasing this guy, which probably means that he's actually thinking. I don't necessarily agree with everything he has to say, but when you consider that the last three films I've reviewed had about one idea between them, I applaud his willingness to stand up and say it.
Try to follow this. The film that we're watching being made in "Irma Vep" is a re-make of an actual silent French serial called "The Vampires." Irma Vep, the name of one of the jewel thieves in the completely blood sucker-less stories, is an anagram. (Bonus points if you can figure it out.) The film is being directed by a fallen New Wave director played by Jean-Pierre Leaud. In reality, Leaud was one of the New Wave's top actors, starring in several Truffaut films, amongst many others. This kind of self referential stuff is fun if you're into it, but that's not to say that the uninitiated won't have anything to enjoy in "Irma Vep." There's always Maggie Cheung.
Cheung is a real-life Hong Kong action movie star, and, in "Irma Vep," she plays Maggie Cheung, real-life Hong Kong action movie star. Cheung (or "Cheung," if you will) is pretty dazed when she gets to Europe. Leaud's director speaks very poor English, and he really has no answer as to why he's casting a Chinese action star in a film about French jewel thieves. It seems after a while that the main reason is because he realized just how cool Cheung would look in her costume, a head-to-toe latex cat suit reminiscent of the one Michelle Pfeiffer wore in "Batman Returns." Cheung may be a big star in Asia, but she's new to me, and she is spectacular. She's sexy, but that's not really the point. She's a physically graceful actress with an infectious laugh, and is just about as charming on screen as anyone I can think of. I'd like to say that an American studio should figure out how to use her, but God knows they'd probably make a mess of it. Keep your eyes open, though -- Hollywood as a whole may be dumb as a brick, but one thing it surely understands is a form-fitting latex body suit.
Nothing goes right with the making of the film-within-the-film, but the problems are believably personality based, as opposed to the endless sight and sound gags that befell the production in 1996's woeful "Living in Oblivion." Leaud's character, to say the least, is a little neurotic, and eventually has a full-fledged nervous breakdown. Zoe, a costume designer (very engagingly played by Natalie Richard), has a secret crush on Cheung. In a truly fantastic sequence at a dinner party for some of the crew members, this secret is revealed. The emotionally complex party is almost lackadaisically choreographed, shot in a non-jiggling hand-held style reminiscent of the best of Robert Altman. There's an offhand, economical quality to a lot of the better stuff in the movie, but this sequence is as good as I've seen in a long while. When you watch three or four movies a week, as I do, and they mostly stink to high heaven, it becomes a little difficult to lose yourself in them after a while. That was certainly not the case here.
At the end of the movie, we get to see a few minutes of the footage that Leaud was working on before his breakdown. It isn't so much a clip of the film he was making as much as it's a jarring, scratched emulsion attack on the film he ended up with. There's an anger in "Irma Vep" that only comes to the surface at this point, and the result is an unexpected shock to the system.
Assayas may not be as ambitious as he is clever, but he knows what he's doing and it shows. He and Cheung have teamed up for one of the better films of the year. See it if you get the chance. Spielberg's dinosaurs can wait a couple days.
"Irma Vep" is a challenging, non-violent film with one pointless nude scene. The language is only offensive if you hate French and broken English. Rated R. 96 minutes.
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