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.
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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.
“You can see from Irma Vep, I’m quite different as a person, as an actress, [to what Hongkongers think],” she told the Post in 1996.
“She was a movie star in the way that we have forgotten about in the Western world,” Assayas said in an interview, referring to the old-school Hong Kong star system which still existed in the 1990s.
“She was worshipped,” he said. “I wondered what kind of movie I would have made if I was in an environment where you still had such movie stars.”
Assayas decided to explore that idea in a script, and the result imagined what would happen if Cheung was invited to France to star in a remake of Les Vampires.
In the film Cheung tells the director, played by Jean-Pierre Leaud, that those scenes were actually performed by stuntmen, not her.
Assayas wrote the script and sent it to Cheung, after meeting her briefly at a cocktail party. “I was very touched that someone would write a screenplay for me. Playing myself interested me, because I’ve never played anyone who’s close to who I am, or worked with a director who gave me the space to just be,” Cheung told the Post.
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Assayas specifically instructed Cheung to be herself, she said in an interview. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to act, I just want you to be in the film as an actress from Hong Kong’.”
“It was a breath of fresh air,” she said.
Clean (2004)
Clean, an intense drama about a recovering heroin addict, is the second film that Assayas wrote specifically for Cheung.
Assayas had the idea for the film while the two were still married, but as Cheung did not want to make a movie with him while they were together, it was filmed a few years after their amicable split.
As the character in Irma Vep was Cheung playing her real-life self, Assayas wanted to write a role that allowed the actress to experiment with her technique and extend her range.
“She felt, and I felt, that she only had to be herself [in Irma Vep],” Assayas said in an interview. “We didn’t have the space to explore the human aspects of her acting. It was extremely limited in terms of what she had to do.”
The resulting role certainly gave Cheung the chance to explore a character in depth and express the full gamut of emotions.
In Clean, Cheung plays Emily, a heroin addict who has to reform herself to gain access to her young son after his rock star father dies from taking tainted heroin. Emily has to negotiate with the boy’s friendly but strict grandfather (played by a gruff and sympathetic Nick Nolte), who is looking after her son.
This gives Cheung the chance to act out a wide range of emotions – anger and despair gradually make way for sympathy and understanding.
Cheung managed to find a way to understand her drug-addled character, even though the two were very different.
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“This is like a merging of myself and Emily, my character, in the language and the way she reacts. Obviously I am not a junkie or a rock star, but I know some of the things she goes through, the emotions, the treatment she gets, and the travelling from place to place,” she said.
Cheung enjoyed working in France, where she was still relatively unknown. The cast and crew treated her like a working actress, and she didn’t receive any special treatment like she did in Hong Kong.
She enjoyed hanging out with the crew on a social level and feeling a part of the production process, she said. “It was a very small production, so everyone was involved in a very big way,” she told the Post in 2007. “I even remember helping to lug around equipment.”
But playing such a troubled character did ultimately take a toll. “It’s one of the heaviest films I’ve been involved in. We were shooting every day, so you really had to invest a lot of feeling in it. I fell into a deep depression afterwards.”
“When I finally got out of that, I decided I didn’t want to fall into that kind of black hole ever again,” she said.
Clean marked the last time Cheung would star in a film.
In this regular feature series on the best of Hong Kong cinema, we examine the legacy of classic films, re-evaluate the careers of its greatest stars, and revisit some of the lesser-known aspects of the beloved industry.
