When the news broke that Olivier Assayas was collaborating with A24 on a TV version of “Irma Vep,” the only truly surprising thing about it was that the project had been conceived before the pandemic. Like Zoom orgies, government-sanctioned bleach injections, and the popular wisdom that Andrew Cuomo is somehow good at his job, the prospect of Assayas remaking his 1996 masterpiece is one of those things that would have seemed unfathomable just a few short months ago. Even for a restlessly inventive filmmaker whose previous foray into television produced the most exciting crime epic of the last 10 years, the pitch reeked of desperation, a fetishistic desire for “normalcy,” and the need to keep working at any cost.

Until…

92/100

Celebrating 20 years of being powerless to articulate my intense love for this glorious whatsit. As I wrote back in '97, it "seems in some bizarre way to entirely transcend logic and reason, so that whatever limited critical faculties I possess are completely disengaged, and I'm reduced to pointing at the screen with a wild-eyed, gleeful expression." What I'm mostly responding to, I think, is Assayas' passion both for Cheung and for cinema itself—more specifically, to the way that those two passions intersect and collide. He's made a movie that's fundamentally an open letter to himself asking why he feels driven to make this movie, and he never does come up with a coherent answer. In less assured hands,…

"You must respect the silence."

Weirdly reminded me a little of Inside Llewyn Davis, since they're both about insular, somewhat ruthless communities that nevertheless convey lot of real human warmth within those communities - Maggie Cheung seems pretty comfortable among her new friends even despite that tricky language barrier (I first saw this 5 years ago on a print, so it's taken until now to learn that so much of Jean-Pierre Leaud's dialogue is indeed unintelligible, even to the home video closed caption people). And the dinner party scene is so true to life and bursting with detail that it's hard to believe these people aren't all friends, coworkers, and acquaintances in real life.

Treats Les Vampires as either a…

An interesting piece from director Olivier Assayas starring Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung playing herself as she gets a role in a French film - a remake of silent classic Les vampires - and all the struggles and strifes that come with making a movie with a distinctly odd director (Jean-Pierre Léaud).

Having re-watched Asia Argento's Scarlet Diva recently it remains in my thinking and Irma Vep felt and looked like a continuation of that way of movie making. Semi autobiographical, ad-hoc script, complete Guerrilla film making.

Maggie suffers a sense of isolation being the only non-French speaker among the cast and witnesses the on set turmoil and petty jealousies first hand. In some way it's an essay on French…

Some gorgeous people appear more naked the more clothes they put on, one of the consequences of bodies operating on frequencies beyond those of visible light. Maggie Cheung is not one of these people. She doesn't exude sex so much as she does glamour. She wears clothes just as far as they'll go. They don't wear her. In consequence, she's never overdressed, and she's never out-dressed.

In Irma Vep, Maggie Cheung as Maggie creeps into the hotel room of perhaps the nudest woman in all of Paris. Maggie is in a latex catsuit. By contrast, the woman wears only a full body pout. But this cannot account for all of the difference. What makes her so naked, so much? She's…