Irma Vep

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Irma Vep
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Produced by Georges Benayoun
Written by Olivier Assayas
Starring Maggie Cheung
Jean-Pierre Léaud
Nathalie Richard
Cinematography Eric Gautier
Editing by Luc Barnier
Distributed by Dacia Films
Release date(s) November 13, 1996
Running time 97 minutes
Country France
Language French/English
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by the French director Olivier Assayas, starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung (playing herself) in a story about the disasters that ensue as a middle-aged French film director (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) attempts to remake Louis Feuillade's classic silent serial Les vampires. Taking place as it does largely through the eyes of a foreigner (Cheung), it also a meditation upon the then-current state of the French film industry.

Cheung is employed to play the film-within-the-film's heroine, Irma Vep, a burglar, who spends most of the film dressed in a tight, black, latex rubber catsuit, defending her director's odd choices to hostile crew members and journalists. As the film progresses, the plot mirrors the disorientation felt by the film's director. Cheung the character is in many ways seen by other characters as an exotic sex object dressed in a latex catsuit; both the director and Cheung's costume designer Zoe (Nathalie Richard) have crushes on her.

In the 1915 original serial, written and directed by Louis Feuillade, Irma Vep was played by French silent film actress Musidora (1889-1957). Much of the film depicts set-related incidents that echo scenes in Truffaut's La nuit americaine (English title: Day for night), to which Irma Vep owes a large thematic debt.

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