Irma Vep. 1996. France. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. With Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Nathalie Richard, Lou Castel. 35mm. In French, English; English subtitles. 97 min.
In Irma Vep, a New Wave ham director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) enlists Hong Kong action-movie star Maggie Cheung to salvage his doomed remake of Louis Feuillade’s silent-era serial Les Vampires. Squeezing into a black latex bondage suit, Cheung becomes vampish jewel thief Irma Vep and immediately holds the film crew in thrall. With the antic mayhem of a Surrealist comedy and the knowing charms of René Clair and François Truffaut, Olivier Assayas celebrates a lost era of moviemaking while also flouting its genre conventions. Aliza Ma observes that “the complex portrait of Maggie that Assayas puts forth is further obscured and revealed in different measures by her sleek catsuit. The character’s exoticism occasionally gets conflated by other characters with that of her costume: when she is taken to a dinner party by Zoé, the hostess, Mireille (played by Bulle Ogier, who was extraordinary in her own, Karl Lagerfeld–designed catsuit in 1976’s Maîtresse, and Zoé spend a long time speculating about whether the star likes women, how she must feel in the suit, and what will happen to it after the film. Throughout the history of cinema, the black catsuit has been the seductive attire of choice for heroines inhabiting typically male-dominated genres…. For observers, it makes the wearer into an object of elusive desire, but for the wearer, it can function as armor, a rare tool of agency and transgression.”