Act One: The Set-Up
About halfway through Olivier Assayas's 1996 film Irma Vep, the fictionalized version of Maggie Cheung goes to over-the-hill director René Vidal's house immediately after he has a mental breakdown and a shouting match with his wife. Vidal laments the project he brought Cheung to France for -- a remake of the 1916 silent serial Les Vampires -- and he more specifically laments over the character of Irma Vep, who Cheung is playing. Vidal's attraction to Cheung in some way, whether that's to her, or just a sense of wonder about her and her perceived mysterious nature, is what drew him to this project. In just one of a dozen 'meta' aspects of the film, this is also what sparked into motion the process of making this film for Assayas, and that's only intensified when you consider that the pair would get married two years after the release of the film.
Vidal opens up in his exhausted state, saying to Cheung, about Vep, "Irma is an object", which comes shortly after him saying to Cheung, "I am interested in you. You are more important than the character."
The polite Cheung seems to indulge Vidal, just as she has throughout the entire film to this point. She indulges Zoé, a costume designer with a crush on Cheung, as she takes her to a party of crew members well past when she should be resting in her hotel room. Likewise, she indulges Maïté, who tells her of Zoé's interest in her as being more than just co-workers with total politeness, and despite what appears to be a clear lack of interest in the idea, and even outright starting to laugh at Maïté as she is telling her this, she never tells Zoé that she has this information.
Up to this point, the fascination that seemingly the entire cast has with Cheung is somewhat understood as a viewer, but not even close to the magnitude that Vidal and Zoé seem to have over the movie star that speaks no French and knows nary a soul in Paris outside of the production team. It is, perhaps, that infantilization of her that Zoé craves in a partner, and Vidal craves in an actress.
This also, combined with the hyper-sexualization of Cheung in rumors about her love of the suit and her desire to purchase it, along with the scene in the "shop for hookers", also works as a telling bit of commentary by Assayas and how women, specifically Asian women, are looked at within the film industry. Not just in France, but throughout the Western world.
Cheung does have a certain something about her, a je ne sais quoi if you will. Part of that is the arm's length distance Assayas keeps us from Cheung through her character's presentation. When Cheung arrives at the production office, her very first action of the film, we learn that she is arriving late due to a shoot for a movie in Hong Kong going long. In the film, her character is an action star that fights off 'frogmen' underwater and Thai drug dealers. We learn, always from others, in French, that she does not speak any French. And that's about it. We learn more about the character that she portrays in the film in Hong Kong than her.
Cheung's character of her fictionalized self is a blank canvas. Assayas does not give Cheung lengthy expository monologues, and other characters don't espouse on-and-on about her as an actress. Scenes involving her generally revolve around her reacting to situations; after all, acting is reacting. Whether that's the shoot itself, the party with Zoé, the interview scene, or her conversations with Vidal, these all revolve around Cheung responding to her environment and trying to be polite (more on that in a second).
Instead, what we get are rumors. That Cheung wants to buy the suit. That Cheung and Zoé hooked up after the party. That Cheung is romantically interested in women. These are the bits of information we have to try and formulate an understanding of Cheung's character because we are getting nothing else from Assayas.
The reason this works so well is that it mirrors what we would expect reality to be when it comes to actions. Cheung, in this film, is an actress from another continent, brought into France by an 'auteur filmmaker, to work on a project that is a remake of a serial from 80 years prior that she has never seen outside of the glimpses that Vidal shows her at his home. Cheung rarely gives a straight answer, but it's because of that overwhelming professionalism and politeness, and an understanding of her own lack of understanding of French society norms.
Maïté asks Cheung if she wants to buy the suit. Cheung stands there, speechless, as Maïté's tone becomes almost interrogatory. Maïté moves on and Cheung seems pleased, but then she drops one of the film's best lines of dialogue on Cheung.
"Do you like girls?"
Cheung is obviously caught off guard and, seemingly desiring not to offend, turns the question back to Maïté. Again, not a straight answer. Finally, when Maïté asks, point blank, if Cheung likes Zoé, Cheung gives another non-answer, saying, "I never thought about it." Again, this could be read as a cryptic response, but this also could simply be Cheung being polite. What's important is the ambiguity in the true meaning, and it's an ambiguity that Assayas is very consistent in presenting throughout the entire film. She ultimately turns down Zoé in what ends up being her last interaction with any character in the film's main cast that we see, but it's not about the destination, it's about the journey.
Going back to Vidal's statement that "Irma is an object", this scene between Maïté and Cheung makes that statement ring true, especially when you consider the placement of that scene with Vidal coming almost immediately after this one where Cheung is objectified by two separate people for two similar but different reasons. When Vidal says this, we are inclined to agree, not just because of what we're seeing in the film-within-a-film, but because of how Cheung is being treated. Cheung, ever the optimist, plays up Irma Vep as a character. Cheung notes how she's strong, she's courageous, and she's the center of the story.
To this point, Cheung is the center of the story, but it is more like an object, echoing how Vidal feels about Irma Vep. Zoé calls her a "plastic toy" in regards to her skin-tight latex suit and, in more ways than just the costume, she really is a plaything.
Zoé is a costume designer that fits Cheung to make sure the Catwoman-esque suit is up to the demands of Vidal's vision. She is quite literally playing dress-up with Cheung. Likewise, Vidal is ordering around Cheung which emphasizes the director/actress relationship, but also within the context of Les Vampires, it serves as a way for him to (consciously or unconsciously) exert that power over her that Moreno does to her character when she is hypnotized. Sure enough, later in the film we also see her opposite lead across from her clearly possessing a crush on her. In their rehearsal of the scene, it's clear that he's fulfilling some sort of desire by exerting his power over her, ordering her to be scared for their scene -- another later example of Cheung being presented as a plaything in her latex suit.
The film is about Cheung, but we never see that strength and courage from Irma Vep in the film, but more importantly, we don't see it from Cheung either to this point. Cheung leaves Vidal's house seemingly in good spirits. She continues to be polite and kind to everyone and seems to take her role in the film seriously. But we never get any glimpse at Cheung and how she's feeling. We are not privy to her private thoughts and actions.
She then hops over a gate or a fence near an open window, gets in her cab, and goes back to her hotel.
And then Tunic (Song For Karen) by Sonic Youth comes on and we are transported to another world.
Act Two: The Pay-Off
In an extended, five-minute, dream-like scene, Cheung turns into Irma Vep. She sneaks into the hotel room of an anonymous woman, steals a particularly gaudy jeweled necklace, evades being noticed by some hotel patrons in the halls, then, in a stunning sequence, gets to the roof of the hotel in the pouring rain and drops the necklace off the catwalk to the ground below.
Suddenly, everything makes sense. We, the viewer, now get it. We not only get why Vidal wanted Cheung in his film, but we understand why Assayas did too. Vidal's vague expressions of wanting a modern Irma Vep in his first meeting with Cheung are fulfilled through Assayas's filmmaking. This sequence is Assayas's own way of remaking Les Vampires. He does it again, to an extent, with the final scene of the film, but that is through the character of Vidal and the sequence is more about him. This scene, for all intents and purposes, might as well have never happened in the "reality" of Irma Vep. No one is around to see it, of course, and it is left ambiguous as to whether or not this was a dream sequence or not. It is entirely Assayas's doing on a meta-scale. And taking into account everything that has already happened in the film, it is perfectly executed.
This is the only scene we get that is just Cheung for an extended period of time, though. This is our one look into her life. What we see is what the cast and crew are imagining about her. Their fantasies are presented to us, through this exhilarating sequence, as reality. It is, then, up to us to decide if we believe that Cheung is living a truly double life full of method acting to the extreme, or simply a woman in a country that she is unfamiliar with surrounded by people she doesn't know. Regardless of what we think, the mystique and the intrigue that surrounds her is very prominent here.
The scene immediately following this is Cheung missing a wake-up call for the next day of shooting. She is dressed in her latex suit with magazines strewn across the bed and table next to her bed, just as we saw in the first moments of the dream-like scene, but there could also be a more sensical reason for that too. She had, after all, just come back from a conversation with the director of her film where she seemed to grow in excitement about the role. We see how seriously she takes her acting, as well. So, from there, a very logical conclusion could be that after the very late night with Zoé (they were out till at least 1 AM, and then Cheung went to Vidal's, this all ahead of a 7:30 AM wake-up call), Cheung simply fell asleep while trying her best to get into a method acting mindset ahead of a shoot that clearly means a lot to its beleaguered and worn-down director.
By the last scene of the film, when another old, aging, French director, this one named José Mirano, takes over the film, she is gone. To New York, or is it Los Angeles, didn't someone say she was going to talk to Ridley Scott? But wait, the production lead thought it was Hong Kong? No one really seems to know where she's gone, but it's clear that she's vanished in a mysterious manner that suits her character, her last scene literally driving away in a taxi.
She still lingers over the head of the project. In Vidal's avant-garde presentation of the footage that he had, Cheung is all over the footage, which eventually descends to black and white splotches and lines, the result of Vidal railing against the thoughts of "just images, no soul" that he felt the initial footage had. The last image that we can make out is Cheung's face. It fades out, we get five seconds of those lines and black and white coloring on the screen, and the film ends.
The end result of Vidal's involvement in this project is something that certainly could also be called "just images, no soul" by a public that exists within the realm not just of the real world, but of the fictional world as well. Vidal's latter-career films are laughed at by the critic who interviews Cheung as he calls them "nombrilistic", which can be understood in translation as 'films about the belly button', or just a very self-absorbed work/auteur. Indeed, this footage is almost a descent into madness that fits the mental state of Vidal at the time he would have edited this footage. But it is clear to us having watched Irma Vep and seen Maggie Cheung transform herself into Irma Vep, even for just one scene, that she is the soul of the film, and Vidal's vision as a director may not have been realized, but, at least to us, it is understood.
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