Sept 7 movie: Irma Vep. Kicking off the Maggie Cheung tribute with a winner: this is a hilarious French film about an eccentric, formerly brilliant director named René Vidal, doing a remake of the silent French classic Les Vampires, which stars Maggie Cheung (playing herself) as Irma Vep. René starts to fall apart and the production follows him down, with a lot of great moments along the way: Maggie's silly costar, who tries to rehearse a scene using a squeak toy shaped like a steak for a gun; the reporter who interviews Maggie, knows nothing about her career and only wants to rave about John Woo; the replacement director who talks about high principles and then admits that he needs the work because his welfare is about to run out. Irma Vep is low-key and dryly funny until the last few minutes, when they show the footage René edited before (or maybe after) he completely lost his shit. It's bizarre and brilliant. A fitting tribute to Ms. Cheung.
(I tried to take a picture of the movie within the movie, which is when I found out that my camera was dead. I miss my camera!)
2 Comments
I forgot to mention the great music in Irma Vep, including Luna's cover of "Bonnie and Clyde," with vocals by Laeticia Sadier. I think that when we saw this movie when it came out (96 or 97 I guess), that was the first time I had ever heard that song. Am I losing music cred by admitting that?
I *loved* Irma Vep--I watched it for a Media Crit class in college. I'm going to watch it again!