`Irma Vep': A Funny, Familiar Look At Cheung

XXX "Irma Vep," with Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Nathalie Richard, Antoine Basler, Bulle Ogier, Arsinee Khanjian, Lou Castel. Directed and written by Olivier Assayas. Varsity, today through Tuesday. 96 minutes. No rating; includes nudity, profanity.

This da-da French production, featuring Hong Kong's Maggie Cheung, Canada's Arsinee Khanjian, Italy's Lou Castel and several aging French icons, is the opposite of a fish-out-of-water comedy.

The heroine is a Hong Kong movie star (Cheung playing herself) who visits France to play the Parisian cat burglar, Irma Vep, in an ill-advised remake of Louis Feuillade's 1915 silent classic, "Les Vampires." You'd expect most of the jokes to be at her expense, yet this (mostly) level-headed actress rarely seems out of touch with the local customs. It's the locals who look like strangers in a strange land.

For instance, there is Cheung's temperamental, flaky director, Rene Vidal, played by French New Wave star Jean-Pierre Leaud ("The 400 Blows"). It's well-known around the set that "he used to be very good," but now his mind is on other things.

The same is true of his lesbian wardrobe assistant, Zoe (Nathalie Richard), who falls in love with Cheung but is too shy to ask if she likes women. She leaves that to her equally gabby matchmaker pal, Mireille (Bulle Ogier), who boldly broaches the subject with Cheung in the film's funniest moment of gender and lingual confusion.

Also out to lunch: a punishing film critic (Antoine Basler) who can't stop pushing his own anti-intellectual agenda; another has-been director (Castel) who eventually takes over the film from Vidal; and a nude American hotel guest (Khanjian) who spends so much time on the phone she doesn't notice she's being burgled.

If Cheung's on-screen character has a fault, it's that she's obsessed with the role she's playing and frustrated with her director's behavior (Sonic Youth's "Tunic" is the perfect accompaniment for her momentary freakout). At one point, when the filmmaking is not going at all well, she slinks around her hotel in her latex Catwoman suit (which keeps buckling and wrinkling, much to Zoe's distress) while preparing to steal Khanjian's jewelry and escape over the rooftops, just like Irma Vep.

Writer-director Olivier Assayas, whose previous films ("Winter's Child," "Paris at Dawn") have not found U.S. distribution, is usually identified with much heavier story material. This is closer to such airy film-within-a-film satires as Francois Truffaut's "Day For Night" (in which Leaud played the manipulated star) and Tom DiCillo's "Living in Oblivion."

The 42-year-old Assayas demonstrates an assured light touch here, drawing expert comic performances from Cheung, Richard and Ogier while using a 16mm hand-held camera to lend the film a live, experimental quality. It dovetails neatly with a surreal and quite hilarious ending that carries the technique - and Vidal's cinematic pretensions - to their logical conclusion.

"Irma Vep" completes the Varsity's six-film Maggie Cheung festival. The film-within-the-film footage from her Hong Kong work may look familiar. The clips are taken from her 1993 martial-arts fantasy, "The Heroic Trio," which the Varsity showed last night in its full-length version.