Jean-Pierre Léaud

Irma Vep

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Zoé and Maggie

Irma Vep is an obvious anagram of “vampire” and so you might reasonably expect it to be about a vampire, or vampires, or something that sucks blood. Maybe? Wrong. And yet right. Oh these trickster French directors. Olivier Assayas wrote this 1996 movie, as he did the 2022 TV show based on it. Both tell the same story – of a foreign actress who arrives in Paris to star in a remake of a classic 1915 film, Les Vampires, about a mysterious black-clad female who is part cat burglar, part seductress and part muse, and the force behind a criminal gang called the Vampires, on account of the dark clothing more than anything … Read more

The 400 Blows

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Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine

The 400 Blows is a monster classic of the French New Wave with a meaningless title, a literal translation of the original French Les 400 cents coups. “Raising hell” would be a more idiomatic way of putting it and the original US subtitler even suggested Wild Oats. But the distributor preferred to stick with the literal and more enigmatic (in English anyway) translation. The Wild Oats being sown, the Hell being raised, the 400 Blows being struck are by the central character, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) modelled on director/writer François Truffaut himself, a kid kicking against the pricks at home, at school, getting into trouble with the law, playing hooky to go to the … Read more