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
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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.

The idea for the film was born out of an attempted collaboration between Assayas, Claire Denis, and Atom Egoyan, who wanted to experiment with the situation of a foreigner in Paris. 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.

However, Assayas has publicly stated that although he considers La nuit americaine a great film, it is more about the fantasy of filmmaking than the reality. Assayas credits Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of the Holy Whore as a much greater inspiration.

[edit] Trivia

Assayas married Cheung in 1998. They divorced in 2001. They again collaborated in 2004 on the film Clean.
Irma Vep is an anagram for vampire.

[edit] See also

Louis Feuillade, director of the original serial film Les vampires (1915-1916)
The Mystery of Irma Vep, a 1984 play for two characters by Charles Ludlam
Lettrism, inspiration for some sequences of the film