French auteur Olivia Assayas scored a triumph last year with his 5 hour miniseries Carlos, and before that, earned praise for crafting the quaint drama Summer Hours with Juliette Binoche. One of the first European directors to capitalize on the emerging talents in Asia, both in front and behind the camera, Assayas has built a career on bridging the gap between film cultures with pictures such as Clean and Demonlover, often to controversial results. His metatextual 1996 effort Irma Vep will be screening at the Texas Union Theatre on the UT campus.
Jean-Pierre Léaud (of Francois Truffaut’s Antione Doneil series) plays Rene Vidal, a caricature of idiosyncratic perfectionist French directors ala Jean-Luc Godard. His career on the down slope, Vidal decides to remake Louis Feuillade's silent serial "Les Vampires." Yet certain that no French actress can recapture the essence of original star Musidora, he hires Hong Kong heroine Maggie Cheung (played by…Maggie Cheung...in a catsuit no less), who speaks zero French.
In the spirit of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, the making of the film is merely the beginning of Assayas’ postmodern overload, a film that not only seeks to self referentially poke fun at the French New Wave movement (or what’s left of it) but to capture the chaos of movie making. It will screen tomorrow, April 4, from 8 to 10 p.m. Admission is free.
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