Clouds of Sils Maria

Clouds of Sils Maria (2015)
Director: Olivier Assayas
Actors: Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz

Synopsis: Venerable actress, Maria (Juliette Binoche), accepts the older female part in a play where she had made her name playing the younger female part some decades before. Maria holes up in the Swiss Alps residence of the play’s author who recently died, and her interaction with her PA, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), merges evermore with that of the characters and scenarios in the play.

Review: This excellent, gripping piece of work from Olivier Assayas is an ingenious testament to how a proper filmmaker can transform a potentially stodgy and theatrical proposition into something justifiably, almost resplendently, cinematic. Considering that what we have here is an excessively talky film, whose main currency is the ‘literary’ (ideas and themes), Assayas succeeds in making the piece vibrant and visceral. He’s a greater interpreter of mise en scene and location: the opening train ride in particular is a masterclass of filmmaking and storytelling, as his roving camera takes us straight into the frenetic worlds and complex personalities of Maria and Valentine much more intuitively than expository dialogue alone could do. In fact, there are innumerable original interpretations of locations speaking for a specific juncture in the story: from the power struggle between Maria and the chauvinistic old actor she’s always crossed swords with, Henryk, in the Zurich theatre, to the gradual opening up of the Maria-Valentine dynamic in the casino, and the brilliant four-way scene in a Sils Maria restaurant where Maria gets to meet the young Hollywood starlet she’s slated to appear opposite.

Assayas also manages the thematic weight of his story so well. The merging of the concerns of Maria’s play with the dynamic of her own relationship with PA, Valentine, is not overly pretentious, as the dialectic is quite obvious and nicely ironised in the readings where it takes a moment to differentiate lines in the play from Maria’s actual conversations with Valentine. The symbolic Sils Maria/Maloja Snake framing device is nicely done and left suitably symbolic and ambiguous, and the film is a fantastic commentary on modern celebrity, PR, image politics and the struggle to remain true to oneself amid the sheer swirl and invasion of the internet and digital media forms in our lives – though, as the film tells us, these are especially ‘problems’ for famous people of course! (December 2015)