Maggie Cheung

  • Irma Vep (1996)

    Irma Vep (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • Ging chaat goo si [Police Story] (1985)

    Ging chaat goo si [Police Story] (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On VHS, October 2000) Take away the last fifteen minutes, and you’ve got an average Jackie Chan film, with the expected stunning stunts, hilarious humor and stilted eastern style of acting. But add the end mall fight sequence, and you end up with one of his best films. Unlike American action sequences, this one ends up looking both dangerous and painful, as dozen of people crash through enough glass to keep janitors busy until well past closing time. (The opening cars-smashing-through-shantitown sequence is no slouch either.) Featuring Maggie Cheung as the girlfriend character.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, June 2022) I voraciously went through much of Jackie Chan’s classic filmography in the late 1990s, and one advantage of advancing age is the failing memory that means that I get to re-enjoy them nearly all over again. Of course, I did have memories of Police Story: That final slide down a mall pole is an unforgettable anthology piece for a reason, and you can point at two or three other sequences in the film that are worthy of inclusion in any Chan best-of retrospective. But it was still a pleasure to sit down and re-experience the film – this time in glorious HD remaster quality, far removed from the blurry VHS tapes I watched twenty-five years ago. Chan is his usual affable self here, juggling exceptional action sequences and much-sillier comedy. That does come at the cost of uneven pacing, especially in the middle third in-between the bus sequence and the glass-smashing finale at the mall. Still, the look at mid-1980s Hong Kong can be interesting, and the film always has another action sequence or a short sharp thrill, as when a car smashes through a telephone booth or someone is thrown off a roof into a pool. The stunts are nothing short of demented, especially when the film gets to smash most of the glass surfaces in a high-end mall store. Chan is fully engaged in the action sequences – the film (which he directed) was a return to Hong Kong filmmaking after a disappointing American experience, and you can see the glee through which he and his team go out of their way to show Hollywood how it’s done. Police Story would go on to spawn many sequels and spinoffs (the best being the third outing, Super Cop, also featuring Michelle Yeoh), but there’s something still very compelling about the original.