Tue, Aug 4 at 8:00pm: Staff pick introduction from Juniper | BUY TICKETS
Part of Staff Picks and programmed by Juniper, who says “She always stays true to herself and never loses her cool. IRMA VEP is a gorgeous study of color, space and conversation. Blending aesthetics from the silent film era and the 1990’s, I’ve chosen this film for its chicness, both in personality and fashion.”
Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action-movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent crime serial Les vampires. What she finds is a behind-the-scenes tangle of barely controlled chaos as egos clash, romantic attractions simmer, and an obsessive director (a cannily cast Jean-Pierre Léaud) drives himself to the brink to realize his vision. Blending blasts of silent cinema, martial-arts flicks and the music of Sonic Youth and Luna into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Assayas composes in Irma Vep IRMA VEP a witty critique of the French ‘90s film industry and the perennial tension between art and commercial entertainment.
"Slinky, smart and funny, IRMA VEP doesn’t send up that sticky-sweet incense smell you usually get in movies about the joy of cinema-with-a-capital-C. It’s a languorous love ballad, and a daring one, about the way moving pictures move, the way they hold light, the way they steal from us when we’re not looking…. In IRMA VEP, shot in 16 mm on a tiny budget, Assayas affirms that for viewers and filmmakers alike, movies are still worth believing in — that the very lunacy of trusting in their significance is just as brave and extravagant an act as actually going out and making one yourself.” —Stephanie Zacharek, Salon “A true torchbearer of the French New Wave — playful, restless, full of invention, and born of an overwhelming discontent for the status quo… There are innumerable great touches, big and small, in IRMA VEP, which is organic and alive like few movies ever are.” —Scott Tobias, A.V. Club
