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
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In the delightful
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 ).