Irma Vep
- Mon, Jul 13
- Tue, Jul 14
The Frida Cinema's seating is first-come, first-serve. For our Midnight Screenings, please plan on arriving by 11:30pm to ensure ample time for parking, picking up concessions, and securing optimal seats. Screening will begin promptly at midnight.
Director: Olivier Assayas Run Time: 99 min. Release Year: 1996 Language: French
Starring: Antoine Basler, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Maggie Cheung, Nathalie Boutefeu, Nathalie Richard
Our Staff Pick for the moth of July comes courtesy of our wonderful Director of Box Office Operations, Jill, as she has chosen Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough Irma Vep!
Starring an absolutely magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself, she plays a Hong Kong action movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic 1915 crime serial Les vampires. What she finds is a behind-the-scenes nightmare as egos clash, romantic attractions simmer, and an obsessive director (a cannily cast Jean-Pierre Léaud) drives himself to the brink to realize his vision.
Balancing elements of silent cinema, martial arts flicks, and the music of Sonic Youth and Ali Farka Touré into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Irma Vep is a witty reflection on the nineties French film industry and the eternal tension between art and commercial entertainment.