Irma Vep

Irma Vep is a 1996 French comedy-drama film written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung plays a fictionalised version of herself, as disasters result when an unstable French film director (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud) attempts to remake Louis Feuillade's classic silent film serial Les Vampires (1915–16). (Irma Vep is an anagram for the word "vampire".) Taking place largely through the eyes of a foreigner (Cheung), it is also a meditation on the state of the French film industry. Irma Vep was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. It was released in France on 13 November 1996. In 2022, the film was reimagined as a miniseries for HBO, created by Assayas. Plot The plot mirrors the disorientation felt by director René Vidal during a troubled production of a film-within-a-film. Maggie Cheung has been cast to play the film's heroine, Irma Vep, a burglar and a spy, who dresses in a tight, black, latex rubber catsuit. Irma Vep, it is explained, is an anagram for vampire, but she is not a literal vampire. Rather, she is the inspiration for a criminal gang named The Vampires, as in Feuillade's original serial.