Cinema Abroad
Irma Vep
Sponsored by:
Clyde Coffee
Clyde Coffee
Cinema Abroad
Clyde Coffee and The Roxy Theater are thrilled to present Cinema Abroad, a series of classic and contemporary foreign films.
Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action-movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent crime serial Les vampires. What she finds is a behind-the-scenes tangle of barely controlled chaos as egos clash, romantic attractions simmer, and an obsessive director (a cannily cast Jean-Pierre Léaud) drives himself to the brink to realize his vision. Blending blasts of silent cinema, martial-arts flicks, and the music of Sonic Youth and Luna into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Assayas composes in Irma Vep a witty critique of the nineties French film industry and the perennial tension between art and commercial entertainment.
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Leaud
Director: Olivier Assayas
Written by: Olivier Assayas
Duration: 99 min
Released: 1996
Genre: Drama
Original Language: French
Subtitles: Subtitled
Country: France