Irma Vep (1996)

(On Cable TV, August 2020) As someone who likes metafiction films, has watched rather a lot of 1990s Hong Kong films and who has a better-than-average understanding of French movies, I have a bit of trouble accepting that I hadn’t seen Irma Vep until now. After all, it’s a film about the making of a film featuring none other than Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung as an actress asked to star in a French movie adapting a silent-era film to modern times. This being a low-budget production from an unstable director, the production is extremely troubled: Cheung (playing herself) is left to her own devices most of the time, hit upon by her production assistant, gradually fascinated by the tight-fitting suit she’s asked to wear, stuck answering dumb questions from incompetent interviewers, and has trouble explaining the director’s increasingly erratic decisions. It ends badly for the film, albeit not so much for Cheung. (In real-life, she ended up meeting, falling in love and marrying Irma Vep’s director for a few years.) There are clear echoes of Truffaut’s La nuit américaine, although Irma Vep is far more realistic about the process of making a movie – here we have people obsessed about financing, logistics, costumes and overtime, leaving questions of artistic merit as an afterthought. I probably would have liked it had it featured a stronger ending, but Irma Vep can be tons of fun along the way.