Critics reviews

The brilliant behind-the-scenes comedy Irma Vep—for my money, Assayas’s masterpiece—takes the marginalization of art cinema as its subject.

The director's still-signature work is a sort of egghead cinephile love letter to star Maggie Cheung, and much more. It's an actively thinking, self-questioning film—and you can feel Assayas realizing a newfound freedom of experimentation, though the alchemy is more playful than forcible.

Maggie Cheung manages to bridge the two worlds with her alternately befuddled and sultrily confident performance, slipping between the tedious post-neorealism of everyday drama and the freed, post-sync sound, black-and-white universe into which Cheung slips when she gets into her avatar's character.

Olivier Assayas' feverish black comedy—about a film production whose star (Maggie Cheung) and director (Jean-Pierre Leaud) are visibly unraveling—grows more and more unhinged with each scene before exploding, in its final minutes, in a flurry of pure abstraction. Assays' sharp observations about film culture and globalization (a central theme in his later work) share space with loopy identity games and uncomfortable sexual tension...

Two Years at Sea creates a version of Williams and his daily rituals, blurring the line between narrative and nonfiction and, in the process, cultivates a looseness that captures nature's spontaneity. An apocalyptic pall hangs over Rivers' experimental films, which highlight the hermetic worlds of his subjects by intermittently cutting from the vast uninhabited lands where they live to the heaps of other people's tossed-off goods they collect, as if they were preparing for the end of the world.

Olivier Assayas likes to ping-pong between high-nicotine grunge and family tapestries, with erratic results, but his trippily unique Irma Vep (1996) remains a perfect, hilarious, hand-held torrent of rock-n-roll movie-ness, satirizing the chaotic life of "art film" production even as it embodies it, with Maggie Cheung as herself, wading into a post-post-nouvelle vague landscape where classical cinephilia is openly sixty-nining with The New.

With Cheung's performance – direct, unsentimental, nuanced – immediately before us for much of the film, Assayas'Irma Vep is – like Cheung's title character – a universe of delights. At one point, Vidal intones, "You must respect the silence" as he directs a scene with Maggie. Her creaking, squeaking latex gently breaks this silence repeatedly. Feuillade had his moment. Now it's Assayas' turn.

The post-modern compulsions on display here may bring movies together, but they also keep people apart. Irma Vep is a picture of missed connections and tenuous relationships, most touchingly in the scenes between Cheung and Zoe (Nathalie Richard), her smitten costume designer.

Creepy and hip, fast moving and provocative, occasionally quite funny, and adept in its uses of pop music, Irma Vep has a good many calling cards, though disagreements are likely to start as soon as one has to consider what it's about.

Irma Vep is lighter than earlier Assayas, but it ends marvelously with a taste of René's vision—an act of aggression that, combining kinesis and mystery, achieves a primitive essence of cinema.