Latex Movie Review - Irma Vep

First, lest start by saying this is a foreign film. French with English subtitles although Maggie Cheung speaks in English for most of her scenes. Those of you who can't stand foreign or art movies or do not like subtitles may want to fast forward to the latex scenes. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Rene Vidal, a once famous film director who has not shot anything original in years. A film company wants to do a remake of the classic silent movie serial Les Vampires and has talked Rene into doing it. Trying to make an artistic statement out of what is a typical formula blockbuster he decided to cast Asian film star Maggie Cheung ( who plays herself in this movie ) as the lead character Irma Vep. She arrives late due to a film she was shooting in Hong Kong running over schedule and is immediately taken to meet Rene who explains why he decided to take the project, why he believes that Maggie is the only actress in the world who could play Irma Vep, and the artsy way he plans to shoot the movie. But once on the set Rene gets temperamental. The days footage is screened and Rene storms off in despair, putting the production on hold. While waiting for the director to return to work Maggie begins to pal around with the crew and discovers that the costumer is a lesbian and has fallen in love with her. She is also warned that the costumer is a drug addict who in the past has been such a bad influence on other actresses that she caused them to also become addicts. Rene gets into a fight with his wife which ends up with the police called and him being taken away to an asylum. The film is put on indefinite hold and the only footage shot is edited together into a short art film, definitely not what the studio wanted.

Director Olivier Assayas wanted to make a movie about a foreigner experiencing what it was like to work on a French movie production. He himself fell in love with Maggie Cheung from her Asian movies and decided that she was the only one who could be cast in the role as the foreign actress hired to play Irma Vep. A few years later Assayas and Cheung would wed each other. The film he eventually made was a criticism of French cinema and how it takes itself too serious to make exciting movies. the Les Vampires remake should have been a bubblegum summer picture much like the blockbusters made by Hollywood but instead ended up being an incomplete art movie. A film critic interviews Maggie on the set and tells her how much he loves Asian movies such as the ones made by John Woo, then complains that the films made by French directors are vanity pieces that no one really wants to see. In a way Irma Vep could be called a vanity piece, but it is one worth watching.

THE SCENE
Actually, quite a few scenes where Maggie Cheung and others are wearing catsuits. At 9 minutes into the movie Maggie goes to a sex shop with the films wardrobe woman to try on her latex catsuit. At 15 minutes into the movie we see three women wearing catsuits. They are shooting a scene for the Les Vampire movie which has Maggie in her catsuit passed out in a chair. Another actress wearing a catsuit walks up to the window in a trance. The camera filming the scene turns away and the actress is quickly replaced with a stunt woman in a catsuit who then walks out of the window. The best scene is at 50 minutes into the movie. Maggie is in her hotel room wearing the catsuit listening to music. she leaves the room and begins to prowl around the hotel, the film suggesting that she is possessed by the Irma Vep character. She sees a maid knock on the door of one of the guests and then go into the room. Maggie sneaks into the open door and a few seconds later the maid exits the room closing the door behind her. Maggie's catsuit is particularly noisy when she walks around so it is pretty amazing that she is able to pull this off. Now in the room of another guest, who is a naked woman who is on the phone having an argument with someone else, she sneaks up behind her and steals her jewel encrusted necklace. Maggie successfully sneaks out of the room with the stolen jewelry but then hearing other guests approaching runs through a door that leads to the roof where It is raining outside. Now standing in the rain she examines necklace before tossing it off the side of the roof. Further scenes with the catsuit has Maggie lying in her bed wearing it fast asleep and being woken up by some of the film's crew who tell her she has overslept, suggesting that what she did the night before was the result of some drugs that the costumer had given her. She is taken to the set where she does an interview for a magazine still wearing the catsuit and then plans out a scene with the assistant director.