Irma Vep at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema EditorOlivier 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 realise his vision.
Blending blasts of silent cinema, martial-arts flicks, and the music of Sonic Youh 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.
Tickets for cinema screenings will go on sale after the Prime Minister’s announcement on 10 May about Step 3 of the roadmap out of lockdown, which will confirm our reopening on 17 May. Priority booking will be availa…