Aubrey MaloneClouds of Sils Maria (PG)
Twenty years ago, film actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) played the theatrical role of a character called Sigrid, who drove an older woman, Helena, to suicide. Now she’s called on to play the role of Helena in a new version of the play.
Will taking the role make the prospect of her own advancing years more threatening to her? Will she become, like the Margot Channing of All About Eve, a woman desperate to stall the clock of time?
Sigrid is going to be played by Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz). Jo-Ann is a kind of Lindsay Lohan figure, the darling of the media because of her wild lifestyle. But she’s an actress of limited range. When Maria played Sigrid she did so with a grudging respect for Helena. Jo-Ann doesn’t seem to be interested in such gentility.
Jo-Ann has just finished a trashy science fiction film. Maria appears to be headed in that direction too now that the quality roles are drying up for her in an increasingly ageist Hollywood. A return to theatre would preserve some of her dignity even if the role has unsettling aspects for her.
Maria has been traumatised by the suicide of her playwright friend, Wilhelm Melchior. His widow, Rosa, has kindly offered her home to her to rehearse the new play. Valentine (Kristen Stewart) acts as Maria’s make-believe co-star for her as she runs through her lines with her in the Alpine chalet.
Valentine’s job description is ‘assistant’ to Maria but she’s actually much more than that. At times, we wonder if they could even be falling for one another emotionally. Olivier Assayas, the film’s director, plays with such a possibility in this intriguing film just as he plays with the antinomies of age, and the disjunction between the real world and the reel one.
Is it All About Eve revisited or more akin to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, that wonderful study of role reversal and female bonding? In the end, the Stewart/Binoche relationship is left hanging in the air – or should I say the clouds. The film then becomes a riddle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery.
That doesn’t stop it being fascinating. A tantalising study of everything from the evanescence of fame to the emotionlessness of a bland modernity, it attains an added solemnity in its latter stages by the symphonic backdrop of Pachelbel’s canon in D.
Refusing to spoil us with easy answers, Assayas prefers to issue possibilities rather than tease out the convoluted ramifications of his scenarios. His film is a thought-provoking essay on the huge price exacted by theatrical/cinematic success as well as sidebar reflections on divorce and the rampaging hounds of the paparazzi.
The best performance in it, for my money, was by Stewart, an actress I’ve previously thought of as being rather pampered and self-serving. This is her coming-of-age role. It resonates with us despite – or maybe because of – her constant underplaying of it, right up to her (unexplained) exit.
This untimely departure is Assayas’ last laugh on those of us who might seek pat conclusions to complex issues. If fools can ask more questions than wise men can answer, this is a very wise movie indeed.