Irma Vep

Assayas's film about making films. An ageing French director sets out to remake Louis Feuillade's 1915 serial Les Vampires and brings Maggie Cheung from Hong Kong for the lead. Cheung plays herself. She speaks no French, nobody explains what she is doing, the costumier puts her into a latex catsuit, and everyone around the set is inside a different fight: the union, the budget, egos, arguments about French cinema being finished. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays the director, and the casting is deliberate: the child face of the French New Wave, now a burnt-out filmmaker. Its best passage has Cheung wandering the hotel at night in the costume, where the line between the part and the person disappears. It closes on the director's footage with marks scratched onto the film by hand; what is left at the end is not a film but a breakdown. Who it is for: viewers who like cinema about cinema and 1990s French independents. Who it is not for: anyone wanting straight narrative. It is deliberately scattered, and many of its references pass by anyone who does not know Feuillade.