Irma Vep reflections

Maggie Cheung as Irma Vep
Originally uploaded by rustedrare.

Irma Vep (1996) is one of those movies where the film goes crazy in Brechtian glory. When the director is out of the picture, the film is gone, loses its heart: auteur. (Maggie Cheung plays herself.) Cheung plays Paris's underground thief Irma Vep (rearrange the letters and you get vampire). In her latex costume, she steals a necklace of jewels from a tenant in the hotel; even the actor is losing her grip on reality. Basically, Irma Vep is a French film about film as a reflection of life: the hand held camera work and characters add to this idea, and, of course, once the director and main actress are out of the picture, the ending breaks down the reality by using a Brackhage style of scratching up the film stock. Where the destruction of film was always a way to pull the viewer out of the escapist ideals of film; this pulls the creators (of film) into film as a reflection of its creators and their society.