Irma Vep

Irma Vep (1996) was the film that brought Olivier Assayas to international attention: a nimble, self-reflexive comedy about the making of a movie. It premiered at Cannes and cast the Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung, soon to become Assayas's wife, as a version of herself, and it took gleeful aim at the anxieties of French cinema at the time.

Jean-Pierre Léaud, the eternal face of the New Wave, plays the unravelling director who is trying to remake Louis Feuillade's silent serial Les Vampires, while Cheung drifts through a fractious production in that famous latex catsuit. Assayas shoots in a loose, vérité style and fills the film with industry in-jokes, and his affection for the medium is plain even as he diagnoses what ails it. Cheung's poise amid the chaos around her gives the film its centre and its mystery, and Léaud's presence turns the whole thing into a conversation with the New Wave itself.

Critics took to its energy, its wit and its formal playfulness, and it is now counted among the key French films of the 1990s. It is funny and fast, and wise about why people love movies; it satirises film-making and celebrates it in the same breath. Irma Vep also launched one of European cinema's most restless careers. Assayas came back to the material for an acclaimed 2022 television series, which says a good deal about how well this nimble, movie-loving comedy has lasted.