92/100

Celebrating 20 years of being powerless to articulate my intense love for this glorious whatsit. As I wrote back in '97, it "seems in some bizarre way to entirely transcend logic and reason, so that whatever limited critical faculties I possess are completely disengaged, and I'm reduced to pointing at the screen with a wild-eyed, gleeful expression." What I'm mostly responding to, I think, is Assayas' passion both for Cheung and for cinema itself—more specifically, to the way that those two passions intersect and collide. He's made a movie that's fundamentally an open letter to himself asking why he feels driven to make this movie, and he never does come up with a coherent answer. In less assured hands,…

9/10

"Do you like Alain Delon?

"Oh yes, he's very handsome!"

Assayas knows what he's talkin' about, man! Irma Vep is now probably my favorite film about filmmaking. Assayas delivers a film that's more about the fantasy of film making. It's about how we like to embody everything in these people. We want to be in their skin as we make the film and Assayas delivers that wonderfully with Irma Vep. 

This is my introduction to Maggie Cheung and hot damn can she act. Her performance was pretty great and interesting since she's playing herself. Assayas directs her in some wonderful scenes, especially with how she interacts with the rest of the crew. I liked how Assayas had his actors…

100 Classics to See in 2018 ~(26/100)~

After admiring but being cold to Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, I'm surprised I loved Irma Vep so much. It starts early. Assayas has a hypnotic control over the mise en scene, crafting dense and profound juxtapositions, along with a ton of insider info on film productions. Even Maggie Cheung is a juxtaposition - an Asian actress in America, with a British accent similar to mine. I fell for her quickly, and so do the film's characters, appropriately.

Irma Vep does a fantastic job of keeping its subtext buried, besides a few overly expositional scenes. When films are about making films they toe a fine line between being irritatingly under-researched or…

There is much pleasure in Assayas' take on movie making and movie people, but the pleasure for me comes from noticing how I came to rather enjoy and like all those behind-the-scenes groupies, workers and jerks. The dish, of course, is amusing. "Directors thrive on hypocrisy," says one. "Yeah," says another, "but sometimes they go overboard." The interview between Maggie and a young, intense film enthusiast is priceless...John Woo versus Jean-Luc Godard. The film enthusiast has strong opinions about both. Maggie doesn't. Maggie Cheung gives a sweet centre to this movie, but I liked just as much Nathalie Richard as Zoe, the lean, blonde, tentative, cigarette-smoking, girl-liking costume designer.

Film lovers might enjoy one message. "Cinema is not magic. It's…

As always, Assayas's film-industry satire feels both too easy and too inside-baseball, and I can't help but wish the movie wore its weirdness a bit more on its sleeve--the comparisons to Mulholland Drive I've seen are not inaccurate, and maybe it's unfair to want a movie to operate at Lynch's tenor (esp. a Lynch movie Irma Vep predates by five years), but still, can you imagine what it would be like if if the strangeness were dialed up just a degree or two here? That said, the ending is the perfect punchline--an arthouse director who, in his attempt to make a mass-appealing movie in the vein of a Van Damme vehicle, ends up making something even more aggressively experimental--while at…