It shouldn’t take an occasion to celebrate the work of a master filmmaker, but in the case of French auteur Olivier Assayas, I had an apt one — the UK theatrical release of Personal Shopper . Despite being an obsessive-compulsive completist, I must confess that I missed Assayas’ entire early career. The first film I saw of his was Irma Vep (1996), at the Singapore Film Festival. Since we are in confession mode, I might as well admit that I went for the screening because of my obsession with the Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung.
Irma Vep is a film buff’s delight. A satire on the French film industry as she was then, Jean-Pierre Léaud (who aficionados will remember always as Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel) plays a filmmaker who is trying to remake Louis Feuillade’s film serial Les Vampires (1915). In the original, the actress Musidora plays a catsuit-wearing character called Irma Vep, the name being an anagram for vampire. In the homage, Maggie Cheung plays herself. Thematically, the film is a homage to François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), a film about filmmaking, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), inspired by events transpiring during the shooting of Fassbinder’s Whity (1971).
In 1997, Assayas made the documentary short Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung . They married in 1998 and divorced in 2001. As I was in the process of gaining yet another higher education degree, I missed some of Assayas’ subsequent work, and the next one I watched was Demonlover (2002). Much debated at the time, I have three words for you about the film: 3D Manga Pornography. The film swiftly attained cult status, and without it, we may not have the neo-noir classic that is Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon (2016). Clean (2004) reunited Assayas with Cheung professionally, and she plays a former VJ who gets addicted to methadone and must cleanse herself to get closer to her son and get a shot at a music career.
In the delightful Summer Hours (2008), a trio of siblings in France must let go of cherished memories over the course of a sun-dappled summer. Carlos (2010) is a masterful three-part portrait of famed Venezuelan revolutionary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. I met Assayas briefly when he was in Mumbai as part of a French delegation and Carlos was screened.
In Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), Assayas worked with Kristen Stewart for the first time, and the association continues with Personal Shopper (2016). Stewart is in almost every frame in this elegant and enigmatic film, where she plays a personal shopper for a global celebrity. She is also a medium and shares an otherworldly bond with her deceased male twin. The film is a demonstration of what a filmmaker working at the peak of his powers can do, and it came as no surprise that Assayas won Best Director at Cannes 2016 for it (shared with Cristian Mungiu for Graduation ).
