Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Irma Vep is a 1996 film directed by French director Olivier Assayas, which stars Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung who plays herself in a story about the many disasters that ensue when a middle-aged French film maker (played by Francois Truffaut's fetish actor Jean-Pierre Leaud) decides to remake a vintage silent serial called "Les vampires". Cheung plays the heroine Irma Vep. She spends most of the film dressed in a tight, black, PVC suit, defending her directors' odd choices to hostile crew members and journalists. As the film progresses, the plot mirrors the disorientation felt by the film's director. In the 1915 original serial, written and directed by Louis Feuillade, Irma Vep (an anagram for vampire) was played by French silent film diva Musidora (1889-1957). Parts of the film depict set-related incidents that echo scenes in Truffaut's "La nuit americaine" (English title: "Day for night"). Like Truffaut, Assayas was a critic for influential French film magazine Cahiers du cinema. Assayas married Cheung in 1998. They divorced in 2001. See also: Louis Feuillade, director of the original serial film Les vampires (1915-1916) Henri Langlois, who rescued the original film from the trash Alain Resnais, who paid an homage to the film in his Last Year at Marienbad Hotel for Criminals, a 1974 Richard Forman / Stanley Silverman musical The Mystery of Irma Vep, a 1984 play for two characters by Charles Ludlam This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.