Irma Vep - The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray)

Olivier Assayas’s live-wire international breakthrough stars a magnetic Maggie Cheung as a version of herself: a Hong Kong action-movie star who arrives in Paris to play the latex-clad lead in a remake of Louis Feuillade’s classic silent crime serial Les vampires. What she finds is a behind-the-scenes tangle of barely controlled chaos 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. Blending blasts of silent cinema, martial-arts flicks, and the music of Sonic Youth and Luna into a hallucinatory swirl of postmodern cool, Assayas composes in Irma Vep a witty critique of the nineties French film industry and the perennial tension between art and commercial entertainment.

• France
• 99 minutes
• Black & White / Color
• 1.66:1
• French, English
• Spine #1074
• 1996

DIRECTOR-APPROVED TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

- New 2K digital restoration, approved by director Olivier Assayas, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- New interview with Assayas
- On the Set of “Irma Vep,” a behind-the-scenes featurette
- Interview from 2003 with Assayas and critic Charles Tesson
- Interview from 2003 with actors Maggie Cheung and Nathalie Richard
- Musidora, the Tenth Muse (2013), a documentary on the actor who originated the role of Irma Vep
- Les vampires: Hypnotic Eyes (1916), the sixth episode in Louis Feuillade’s silent-film serial
- Cinema in the Present Tense, a June 2020 address on the state of cinema by Assayas
- Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung, a 1997 short film by Assayas
- Black-and-white rushes for the film
- English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by critic Aliza Ma

*New cover by Jillian Adel