★★★★★
Five stars
Across a beautiful vista, we’re invited to stare upon the wonder of the Swiss Alps. We watch expectantly as clouds idle by across the gleaming peaks. Gradually, they begin to coalesce into a new form, winding, snaking into a stream that runs through the crests of the mountains. It’s majestic. And then it dissipates, its wispy matter dispersing into new, unknowable forms. This is the Maloja Snake, a beautiful geographical phenomena, and the central metaphor of the Clouds of Sils Maria. The film is about the nature of time, expectation and uncertainty, expressed beautifully in the Maloja Snake, a brief moment where humans can ascribe meaning and definition to a ceaseless natural process.
The cycle of life colour the film from the off. Following the death of one of her former directors, Juliette Binoche’s french film star, Maria Enders, is asked to consider preforming in a revival of the play, also titled the Maloja Snake, which ignited her career decades ago. But now, rather than playing the hopeful, conniving ingenue, she will play the older woman who is driven to suicide by her charms. Taking the job, she retreats to an alpine house with her personal assistant, played by Kristen Stewart in tow, so as to begin rehearsal. And so the stage is set for seduction – that of ingenue and elder, servant and master, performer and audience, art and critic.
The relationship of these two woman becomes the film’s driving force. Binoche and Stewart spar magnificently, living, breathing and responding on screen. It’s no surprise that Stewart won France’s prestigious Caesar Award for her role – the first american actor to ever do so. Their beguiling performances are aided by Olivier Assayas’ deft screenplay and direction. He begins new scenes mid rehearsal, leaving us unsure as to where the characters begin and their performers end, whether what is being expressed belongs to actor or character. It seems to be a little of both. Assays’ obsessive interest in these women, and indeed the project’s genesis with Binoche as his muse, never make for an uncomfortable or leering film. His interests are cerebral, and the women’s relationship is intelligent and intellectual, a fascination of the mind rather than the body.
Of course the film operates on a meta level too, with Binoche essentially starring as herself – the queen of European cinema – whilst Stewart is granted the opportunity to defend the blockbusters that Binoche’s famous young costar regularly appears in. And Chloe Grace Moretz plays supporting as a wild child tabloid starlet looking for a credible role. A debate between two styles of acting emerges. Is Binoche’s character’s more theatrical, trained method outmoded by her Moretz’s charachter’s emotive, untamed style? Her assistant seems to think so, and so Ender’s need for admiration turns to jealousy. It’s a debate that Stewart’s presence provokes too, with her unique ability to experience authentic emotion on screen. The actors lose themselves in the roles, but at the same time Assayas slyly evokes their public personas. It’s a testament to the skill of all involved that the narrative remains entirely compelling. The film merges all boundaries of character and actor, and invites us to wonder at the alchemy of performance itself.
Can Enders truly stop herself from becoming out of touch? Or is this inevitable, even as in many ways she sees herself as still believing in and identifying with the ingenue’s youthful spirit. Assayas toys with these ideas of expectation and constriction, playing the vastness of the story’s surroundings against the claustrophobia of the intimate interior scenes. He evokes theatrical staging in the way the characters arrange themselves in public spaces – hotel lobbies, restaurants and parties – and in the formal compositions which place his human cast before backdrops of colossal rock formations, constraining both inside a rigid aspect ratio.
The narrative also concerns itself with the nature of modern fame, examining celebrity and their lives-as-performance that play out in gossip magazines, televisions and all manner of pocket sized devices. As Binoche examines her costars’ various mugshots in the pixellated glow of her iPad, we see someone entirely different from the shrewd, cultured young woman who later arrives on the cinema screen. Though the film’s third act loses a little momentum, and hits the occasional false note (jarring only for their complete absence to that point), it’s easily, instantly forgiven. Assayas has crafted a dense, cerebral, engrossing film.
Long after it ends, Clouds of Sils Maria will twist, turn and writhe around in the mind, taking new forms, and revealing new wonders. It’s a film as sublime as the clouds and mountains from which it takes its name.
