Jonathan Rosenbaum has written intelligently often enough that his gaffes and errors just amaze me. In this last month two different films have played in Chicago which have scenes in which Rosenbaum thinks characters are hallucinating.
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In Irma Vep Hong Kong movie star Maggie Cheung plays a Hong Kong actress named Maggie Cheung, who travels to Paris to perform a movie role as a cat burglar and jewel thief. Late in the film Cheung, wearing the cat-burglar costume, prowls her hotel, sneaks into a fellow guest’s room, steals some jewelry, and later discards it. Rosenbaum states this scene may be a hallucination [“Life Intimidates Art,” June 13, 1997], even though Cheung’s character took no drugs, shows no signs of mental illness, and the scene is crosscut with objective third-person point-of-view shots of the drunken, weeping occupant of the room speaking on the phone.
L.D. Chukman
I never used the word “hallucination” when I reviewed Irma Vep. I merely said the sequence of the theft “may or may not be a dream,” which the following sequence–Cheung in the same costume being woken from a heavy sleep in her hotel room–seems to suggest. After all, the theft is completely out of character for Cheung as we see her in the remainder of the film; it makes sense only for the fictional cat burglar she’s playing. It’s worth adding that when I discussed this sequence with Olivier Assayas, the writer-director, he accepted my interpretation as legitimate, if not the only possible reading.
