Blu-ray Review: Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep on the Criterion Collection

This disc’s treasure trove of extras attest to the dizzying flurry of ideas and emotions that fuel Assayas’s uncategorizable film.

Irma VepWritten, shot, and edited, like Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, in a creative rush between larger productions, Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film Irma Vep uses a gallery of frazzled characters to crystallize many of the French filmmaker’s obsessions and, casually and boldly, makes the cinema itself the most frazzled character of all. Appropriately, the setting is a hectic Parisian movie shoot of a remake of Louis Feuillades’s 1915 serial Les Vampires. Into the imploding production, helmed by the once respected but now shaky and befuddled René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud), breezes Maggie Cheung, beguilingly playing herself as a humble, easygoing international star not quite sure why she’s been picked to play Irma Vep, the fearsome leader of a gang of cat burglars. René, who chose the Hong Kong actress as his heroine after watching her in a bit of hyperkinetic wire-fu, doesn’t help things: “You must respect the silence,” he instructs her at the studio, before taking a swig from a jumbo Coke bottle.

An erudite cinephile, Assayas uses Cheung’s three days in Paris to take stock of cinema—and, by extension, the world—as the century comes to an end. Léaud’s presence as an endearing New Wave memento is just one in a welter of in-jokes throughout Irma Vep, which also includes Lou Castel as an older, schlumpfy version of the director he played in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, and views of dead genres (the silent serial, the politicized tract) that materialize like ghosts from French cinema’s past.

Central to Assayas’s meta-analysis is a long, stylized sequence in which Cheung, donning her character’s skintight latex outfit, slinks around her hotel, filches a stranded visitor’s jewels, and hurls them off the roof in the middle of a nocturnal downpour. A dream? An actress getting into character? Practically a mini-movie, the sequence could be read as Cheung enacting for herself the fantasy projected onto her by René, but even that is further complicated by the fact that she’s also enacting a fantasy by and for Assayas, who’d later marry her. Nothing is simple in this comic-acrid portrait of globalized times, where remakes and mélanges extend even into the soundtrack (the too-hip band Luna does a cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s ’60s hit “Bonnie and Clyde,” a French pop tune about Americans).

Advertisement

The postmodern compulsions on display here may bring movies together, but they also keep people apart. Irma Vep is a picture of missed connections and tenuous relationships, most touchingly in the scenes between Cheung and Zoe (Nathalie Richard), her smitten costume designer. “A state of flux” is how Kent Jones described the film’s format, so it’s fitting that, as a glance into the netherworld of moviemaking, it oscillates between the playfulness of François Truffaut’s Day for Night and the caustic sadness of Jean-Luc Godard’s Passion.

Presenting itself as a here-and-now snapshot, Irma Vep’s characters argue that American films have “too much decoration, too much money” and that French films have become ossified by out-of-touch intellectualism. Assayas agrees at least partially with both positions, yet his satire of cinematic decline is undercut by a sense of hope supplied by his own film’s élan, and he even gives the last (visual) word to René by closing Irma Vep with the fallen auteur’s defiant images filling the screen—an unnerving, Brakhagian barrage of defaced projections. An act of vision or vandalism? Earlier, a scrawled manifesto is seen during the screening of a grainy 1969 relic: “Cinema is not magic. It’s a technique and a science.” But it will survive and continue to enthrall, Assayas argues, as long as there are people willing to scratch its surfaces.

Image/Sound

The Criterion Collection’s transfer of a new 2K restoration preserves the ample grain and the overall soft, warm qualities of the images that Olivier Assayas originally captured on Super 16mm. The picture boasts an impressive amount of detail throughout, especially in the nighttime and black-and-white sequences, the latter of which were shot in 35mm and look as mesmerizing and otherworldly as ever thanks to the deep, inky blacks. Immersive and offering a nice separation between channels, the 5.1 surround sound audio is arguably more impressive, especially showing its muscle during the on-set scenes featuring overlapping dialogue or whenever one of the songs from the eclectic soundtrack takes over the soundstage.

Extras

Spread across this two-disc edition is a treasure trove of extras that approach Irma Vep from many angles. In a new interview, Assayas recalls how he met Maggie Cheung and saw the film as a chance to experiment with his filmmaking style. He also discusses Musidora’s trailblazing portrayal of Irma Vep in Louis Feuillades’s Les Vampires. The actress garners further appreciation in an hour-long 2013 documentary, Musidora, the Tenth Muse, that details how Les Vampires and Feuillades’s subsequent Judex, despite centering on characters who commit criminal deeds, won audience sympathies, as well as the actress’s journey toward starting her own production company and stepping behind the camera. For anyone looking to catch Musidora in action, Criterion has also included the complete sixth episode of Les Vampires, “Hypnotic Eyes,” which contains the scenes directly referenced in Irma Vep.

Advertisement

Elsewhere, Assayas reads from his 2020 manifesto “Cinema in the Present Tense,” whose calls for cinema to reinvent itself have echoes in Irma Vep, and in a 2003 interview with critic Charles Tesson, he discusses their trip to Hong Kong in 1984 and elaborates on his fascination with Asian cinema. In another interview from the same year, Irma Vep’s female stars, Maggie Cheung and Nathalie Richard, get their say. Especially memorable is Cheung recalling her excitement over playing herself and working with a foreign director in a strange environment. This release also comes with some other wonderful odds and ends, including a half-hour of behind-the-scenes footage from the film, a few minutes of black-and-white rushes of Cheung prowling rooftops, and Man-Yuk, a 1997 silent short by Assayas also starring the actress. The package is rounded out with a fold-out booklet featuring an essay by critic Aliza Ma, who teases out Assayas’s unique blend of postmodern philosophy and intimate human drama.

Overall

Criterion’s generous assortment of extras are a testament to the dizzying flurry of ideas and emotions that fuel Olivier Assayas’s uncategorizable Irma Vep.

Score: 
 Cast: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard, Bulle Ogier, Lou Castel, Arsinée Khanjian, Antoine Basler, Nathalie Boutefeu, Alex Descas, Dominique Faysse, Bernard Nissile, Olivier Torrès  Director: Olivier Assayas  Screenwriter: Olivier Assayas  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1996  Release Date: April 27, 2021  Buy: Video

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.