Irma Vep (1996)
Country: FR
Technical: col/1.66:1 99m
Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard
Synopsis:
A Hong Kong actress comes to Paris to appear in an eccentric director's remake of Feuillade's Les Vampires, is briefly seduced by the mystique of the entrerprise and her erotic S&M costume, but finds herself back on a plane (to Hollywood) when the director has a breakdown and is replaced.
Review:
A curiosity, as if made by a director marking time between projects, or as a paën to his then-wife. It is reminiscent of Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine on the one hand, and a kind of wry satire on the fate of auteurist cinema in France on the other, with the director poking self-referential fun at the kind of deeply personal project for which his director character, tellingly played by Léaud, is lambasted by a critic in the film. The results are uneven and vaguely self-indulgent, with the minutely staged reconstructions of sequences from Feuillade's original serial providing the most meat for cinephiles.
Country: FR
Technical: col/1.66:1 99m
Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard
Synopsis:
A Hong Kong actress comes to Paris to appear in an eccentric director's remake of Feuillade's Les Vampires, is briefly seduced by the mystique of the entrerprise and her erotic S&M costume, but finds herself back on a plane (to Hollywood) when the director has a breakdown and is replaced.
Review:
A curiosity, as if made by a director marking time between projects, or as a paën to his then-wife. It is reminiscent of Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine on the one hand, and a kind of wry satire on the fate of auteurist cinema in France on the other, with the director poking self-referential fun at the kind of deeply personal project for which his director character, tellingly played by Léaud, is lambasted by a critic in the film. The results are uneven and vaguely self-indulgent, with the minutely staged reconstructions of sequences from Feuillade's original serial providing the most meat for cinephiles.
Country: FR
Technical: col/1.66:1 99m
Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Nathalie Richard
Synopsis:
A Hong Kong actress comes to Paris to appear in an eccentric director's remake of Feuillade's Les Vampires, is briefly seduced by the mystique of the entrerprise and her erotic S&M costume, but finds herself back on a plane (to Hollywood) when the director has a breakdown and is replaced.
Review:
A curiosity, as if made by a director marking time between projects, or as a paën to his then-wife. It is reminiscent of Truffaut's La Nuit Américaine on the one hand, and a kind of wry satire on the fate of auteurist cinema in France on the other, with the director poking self-referential fun at the kind of deeply personal project for which his director character, tellingly played by Léaud, is lambasted by a critic in the film. The results are uneven and vaguely self-indulgent, with the minutely staged reconstructions of sequences from Feuillade's original serial providing the most meat for cinephiles.