In Irma Vep (it makes a biting anagram) Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung plays herself – a Hong Kong star flown to Paris to play the title role in an arthouse French movie – with charming bewilderment. The film-within-a-film, a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent crime thriller Les Vampires, is directed by a temperamental, washed-up helmer played by Jean-Pierre Léaud – star of another French movie on movie-making, Truffaut’s Day For Night. Writer/director Olivier Assayas, Cheung’s partner at the time and later (but only briefly) her husband, has fun with all the references and in-jokes – shot on 16mm in three weeks on a derisory budget, the story offers ample opportunities to send up the rickety, disorganised state of the highbrow end of French filmmaking. But chiefly it’s an excuse for Cheung to slink around in a skin-tight black latex catsuit (a sight to delight fetishists everywhere).
DVD Extras:
The extras – some interviews and rushes – don’t really add much.
