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…

Irma Vep sort of plays like a French Living in Oblivion, whipping between the multiple points of views of characters working on a film set. There is the overly anal assistant director, Laure (Nathalie Boutefeu), who’s always finding a way to be on somebody’s case, but particularly takes a liking to hounding the artistically aloof production designer, Zoé (Nathalie Richard). The old, washed-up director, René (Jean-Pierre Léaud), cryptically speaks in whispers and pseudo-intellectual idioms, and the contrastingly confident director of photography, Markus (Bernard Nissile), may as well be the one really running the show. And, as always, the lead actress, Maggie Cheung (who plays herself), is counterintuitively the most grounded person there. But, this is a French Living in Oblivion…

“To few, it’ll be grief.“ 
 
Olivier Assayas wants more from us. His best cinema suggests a man enamored with what the storytellers of old and new, visual or not, have made, accomplished, reached, unimpressed with what they made of themselves in turn, looking past their creation to the reflection of their own image and declaring it good. For him, there is more.

The potential of cinema, as a failed endeavor, corrupted by rote self-absorption, by rampant egotism, attributing all glory and greatness discovered by the medium to the self, turning what is offered away, keeping it. The potential of cinema, as an enigmatic, ineffable sorcerer of time and all there is to see, as a beautiful entity, alive, capable of…