Cheung is employed to play the film-within-the-film's heroine, Irma Vep (an anagram for vampire), a burglar, who spends most of the film dressed in a tight, black, latex rubber catsuit, defending her director's odd choices to hostile crew members and journalists. As the film progresses, the plot mirrors the disorientation felt by the film's director. Cheung the character is in many ways seen by other characters as an exotic sex object dressed in a latex catsuit; both the director and Cheung's costume designer Zoe (Nathalie Richard) have crushes on her.
The film makes reference to iconic figures in French film history: Louis Feuillade, Musidora, Arletty, FranÃ§ois Truffaut, the Groupe SLON, Alain Delon, and Catherine Deneuve. Thematically, the film questions the place of French cinema today. It is not a âmourning for cinema with the romantic nostalgiaâ but âmore like the Mexican Day of the Dead: remembrance as an act of celebration,â[3] so that âIt is less a film about re-presenting the past, than it is a film about addressing the present, specifically the place of France within the global economy.â[4]
The Mexican Day of the Dead is remembrance as an act of what?
celebration