IRMA VEP (78) (85 - third viewing)

Directed by: Olivier Assayas

Starring: Maggie Cheung, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Nathalie Richard

The Pitch: Tensions on a film-set sink a remake of Louis Feuillade's Silent classic "Les Vampires".

Theo Sez: To invert Pauline Kael's comment about CITIZEN KANE, "More great than any fun movie I can think of." Which is not to say it's in the KANE class, much less that it wants to be : indeed, what's most striking about this wonderfully warm movie-about-movies is how unpretentious it all is, very much a film in a minor key - no more than a dozen or so extended sequences interspersed with short passages (moments, really) of piercingly dreamlike beauty. The playful lightness is no doubt deliberate given that cinematic pretentiousness is so prominent among the film's themes, whether it's the burnt-out director bemoaning the inability to go beyond "images about images" or the obnoxious journalist rhapsodising about John Woo ; the film is more sympathetic to the former than the latter but its point is the same in both cases - films are made with desire, not despondent misanthropy or reductive contempt but the same passion and energy that goes into working, partying, bickering and - well, living. It's not so much a lament for French arthouse cinema (which, after all, is enjoying its rudest health in years) as a re-affirmation of it, or at least that extrovert-humanist strand of it that runs from Renoir to the Nouvelle Vague and is exemplified by the mood of restless gregariousness running through the movie, familiar to anyone who's ever been on a film set. Film - as the fabulous ending seems to be saying - is after all a flimsy thing, endlessly pliable ; it's people who matter.