Explainer | How Hong Kong film star Maggie Cheung was able to explore her acting abilities in 2 films directed by Olivier Assayas, to whom she was briefly married
- Maggie Cheung appeared in two films directed by Olivier Assayas: Irma Vep, in which she played a version of herself, and Clean, in which she was a heroin addict
- Assayas wrote both roles for Cheung, to whom he was briefly married. Of Clean, she said: ‘For the first time, I was able to put a lot of myself into the role’
Maggie Cheung Man-yuk often said that Hong Kong films didn’t give her the chance to fully explore her acting abilities. Two films she made with her one-time husband, French director Olivier Assayas, demonstrate what she meant.
Irma Vep (1996)
Irma Vep, the first film Cheung made with Assayas, is a fascinating art-house piece about a director trying to remake an episode of Les Vampires (The Vampires), a famed French silent film series about a feline thief who haunts the rooftops of Paris.
In the film, Cheung plays herself as an actress who arrives in France from Hong Kong to play Irma Vep, the leader of The Vampires crime gang.
The lighthearted, elegant film details Cheung’s adventures on and off set as she adapts to a different style of filmmaking while negotiating the various troubles and desires of the film’s motley cast and crew.
“Irma Vep is one of those rare movies that manages to be entertaining, witty and provocative all at the same time,” this writer said in a glowing Post review in 1997.
Cheung sports a tight latex “whore’s outfit” for her role in the film-within-a-film – films are all about selling desire, her character says – while quietly adapting herself to the slower, more discursive European way of working.
