Irma Vep

Director: Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Assayas

1996 / 99min / DCP

Maggie Cheung in the role she was literally born to play: Maggie Cheung. The Hong Kong actress is imported to star in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 serial Les Vampires directed by a New Wave has-been (Jean-Pierre Léaud), but then finds herself submerged in a strange world of flirtatious lesbians, bourgeois ex-radicals, Luc Besson admirers, and all-night raves, all the while becoming oddly in thrall to her form-fitting S/M catsuit, which lures her out onto the rooftops of Paris. A meditation on global cinema at a moment of transition, a comedy about filmmaking and cultural crosstalk, and a movie so alive to the textures of contemporaneity that it hasn’t aged a day.