Irma Vep (#1074)

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.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

New 2K digital restoration, approved by director Olivier Assayas, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray

New interview with Assayas

On the Set of “Irma Vep,” a behind-the-scenes featurette

Interview from 2003 with Assayas and critic Charles Tesson

Interview from 2003 with actors Maggie Cheung and Nathalie Richard

Musidora, the Tenth Muse (2013), a documentary on the actor who originated the role of Irma Vep

Les vampires: Hypnotic Eyes (1916), the sixth episode in Louis Feuillade’s silent-film serial

Cinema in the Present Tense, a June 2020 address on the state of cinema by Assayas

Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung, a 1997 short film by Assayas

Black-and-white rushes for the film

English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

PLUS: An essay by critic Aliza Ma