Olivier Assayas's IRMA VEP (1996)

First of all, it should be noted that few cameras have adored a modern performer as much as the one here loves to film Maggie Cheung; that could be said for a number of her other films as well, but here she just lights up every moment she is seen.

Irma Vep is another of those films I come across and feel a sense of bewilderment that I did not get this into my mind and soul ten or even twenty-five years ago, as it is a movie about the movies, but also about how the people who work on movies are not this amorphous blob of the best of the best skilled technicians (at least on an independently-scaled sort of level), and that anyone who works on a movie is just a human being. Though it is quite different in terms of structure and even in style, I think a good double feature would be this and Tom DiCillo's Living in Oblivion, at least in the scope of how the actors and director and the various production personnel are demystified if nothing else because both directors know that what they do and the people around them should be worthy of satirizing.

While I think Living in Oblivion is the funnier film, one thing that is so wonderful about Irma Vep is how your expectations get upended - at least if you go by the poster for the film, which I had seen for years and thought naively and idiotically "well, this looks even too strange and likely too Hipster-wannabe Cool for me." Especially after one comes across many other Assayas films where his originality and daring is on display- take your picks, but Carlos, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper, take your pick- is not just in his subject matter but how he works with actors and how he must make for one of the most free-feeling and collaborative sets as so many performances in his work, and Irma Vep is a prime example, jump off the screen as being so natural while still having a heightened quality fit for the movies, if that makes sense.

Another way to put it is that one thing that I was not worried but curious about was how much would Assayas, since this is a story where a middle-aged director also played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, would pay homage to Day for Night. He has said in interviews he had Fassbinder and Beware a Holy Whore on his mind, and while the respective filmmakers' attention to stylization is different (Assayas makes it feel like you are in the room in a semi-documentary mode despite everything still feeling clearly from a script, while Fassbinder has his own morbid aesthetic taste when it comes to his actor's deliveries), I can see more of that than Truffaut. There were personal BTS relationship issues in Day for Night, but it had a much lighter feeling than what is here - or, rather, Assayas if he has any connective tissue to that film it is to say, "imagine that director twenty years later and it has been a roooooough twenty years."

In brief, Assayas is interested in making his film about filmmaking his way, which is to say that at the center of this is not really the washed-up director (he is, albeit very colorful and forceful and it is pribably Leaud's best late-career performance, a supporting character), it is Maggie Cheung. She is the grounded presence who is very much an interloper not only because she doesn't speak or understand much French and can really only converse in English with a select few, or that her version of Maggie Cheung (probably real but I am not sure till I watch more interviews) doesn't know much French cinema, it is she is cast in the title role of a film that another director in the story points out is a quintessential French production from the silent era by Feudine.

But wherever she is, be it in an awkward on camera interview with a dumbass cinephile (quit it with the John Woo, dude, oh wait it is 1996, I understand), or with (a very good) Nathalie Richard as Zoe who may have some same-sex physical attraction to Maggie, whether she knows if Maggie is into that or not, she is the calm in the hurricane around her, just happy to be playing a role that she enjoys despite her addled director telling her "*it's not funny, it's not fun."  And yet she is not playing it in an overtly "I'm a Star" sort of way, rather as a working actor who is curious about the process, up to and including the comparisons of her costume to Catwoman and the various "but should we be inspired by big Blockbuster crap" mentality around that which she has some mixed feelings about (and by the ending one can see why she may tow the line a little once we know where she is going after all of this).

She is extraordinary because, aside from her great beauty, she is so natural seeming in this version of her from Assayas.  You wonder how much she has had moments like this in her own career or if there were a lot of things she brought to her version of herself, which speaks to what must have been a close collaboration to get as much truth into the dark and weird and absurd situations Maggie sees around herself with Assayas (who she apropos of something later married); a highlight of this is when she is in her rubber latex outfit at night going around the hallways and some rooms in the hotel for reasons that may almost be unclear but seem not to be to her, and how shr peers in on a fully naked woman in a sad conversation on the phone (because why not it is France), and that it becomes a little movie within this movie watching her go around just to find a set of jewels that went missing.  

There is so much that I was enamored with about this film, and aside from the impressive acting and the perceptive and natural writing (notice for example that awkwardness when Maggie chooses not to go to the club and can't fully explain herself to Zoe, perfection), there is this great sense that Assayas is making everything feel loose while having total control, like the way the camera pans around some of the dinners and gatherings, how conversations are made visually interesting when they could be made duller in lesser hands. 

And once you get to that ending it is the kind of phantasmagorical "Whoa what is this" cinematic display that is like a less nervous-breakdown kind of Babylon presentation.  Like....This is Cinema, if you're bold enough to let go of everything that holds you back.