Irma Vep

Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep (1996) was the film that brought the French director to international attention, a nimble, self-reflexive comedy about the making of a movie. Premiered at Cannes, it cast the Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung — soon to become Assayas's wife — as a version of herself, and gleefully skewered the anxieties of contemporary French cinema.

Jean-Pierre Léaud, the eternal face of the New Wave, plays the unravelling director attempting to remake Louis Feuillade's silent serial Les Vampires, while Cheung drifts through a fractious production in the iconic latex catsuit. Assayas shoots in a loose, vérité style, filling the film with industry in-jokes and genuine affection for the medium even as he diagnoses its malaise. Cheung's poise amid the surrounding chaos gives the film its centre and its mystery, building to a celebrated, near-experimental coda.

Critics embraced its energy, wit and formal playfulness, and it has since been recognised as a key film of 1990s French cinema — Assayas himself returned to it for an acclaimed 2022 television series. Funny, fast and quietly profound about the love of movies, Irma Vep is both a satire of film-making and a celebration of it, and the launchpad for one of European cinema's most restless careers. Cheung's poise amid the chaos gives the film its centre, and Assayas returned to the material for an acclaimed 2022 television series — a measure of how durable this nimble, movie-loving comedy has proved.