Review: Limited Theatrical Run
Clouds of Sils Maria | Olivier Assayas | France | 2014 | 124 min
Sundance Cinemas Screening Room, Opens Friday, April 24»
One question you hopefully won’t be hearing people ask is “Whatever happened to Juliette Binoche?” In the event that they do, you can refer them to her most recent work in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria as she gives a wonderful performance as a seasoned actress trying desperately to hold on to her youth. Juliette Binoche takes command of any role she has been given. However, her strong performance in this film is not enough to counterbalance the rigidity of Kristen Stewart’s performance and the middling character study overall.
Juliette Binoche plays Maria Enders, who has been given a chance to revive a role in a play, Maloja Snake, that made her famous 20 years earlier. The play revolves around Helena and her assistant Sigrid. Maria played Sigrid twenty years ago and is eager to play this role again, only now, she is Helena’s age and the role of Sigrid would not quite suit her. Kristen Stewart plays, Valentine, Maria’s personal assistant. Part of Valentine’s (Val) job is to run lines with Maria, which is what gives the film its subtext. Val reads the lines of Sigrid as the parallels between her relationship with Maria and the relationship between the play’s characters unfold on screen. There were a few moments where it wasn’t clear that they were rehearsing lines from the play and you really thought they were hashing out their relationship with each other. This was actually the highlight of the film as viewers were able to peer deeper into their relationship and gave Juliette Binoche a chance to really add some more backbone in this weak story line.
Another layer to the plot is Jo-Ann Ellis, (Chloë Grace Moretz) a spoiled 20-something, Lindsay Lohan wanna-be who will play Sigrid in the new production. Maria watches YouTube videos of Jo-Ann’s antics on her iPad. Chloë Grace Moretz arguably gives the second best performance in this film as the disposable, flavor of the month, Jo-Ann. She clearly relishes this role and plays it with zeal. During an interview with a TMZ like TV tabloid, you really thought you were watching a Ritchie/Hilton/Lohan meltdown circa 2003. The vacancy in her eyes and thought-free persona (she doesn’t know the name of the director of the play) even make Maria burst into merry peals of laughter.
Kristen Stewart has garnered praise recently for her role in Still Alice, and she won a French César award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in Clouds. But I still find her to be too stoic and limited in range to be effective in this film. Stewart’s flat affect may work in sparkling vampire land but it did not work this time . Maybe in reality, a personal assistant for such an actress would have to be so steady as to create a complimentary relationship but her monotone voice and dull stare really pull you out of the film at times.
Oddly enough, there are some moments where Stewart uses this rigidity to her advantage as she finds herself put upon by Binoche’s character from time to time. It is quite obvious that in certain fits of anger, Maria is upset about being relegated to the role of Helena and is taking it out on Val. Maria takes issue with how Val interprets the reading of play and Val questions whether she should continue on in this role.Their relationship is strong enough for Val to address it but Stewart really seems like a mismatch to Binoche’s Maria.
Writer/director Olivier Assayas had a hand in penning the script for André Téchiné’s Rendez-vous (1985), the film that launched Binoche on her trajectory to being one of the most celebrated actresses of her time. My expectations were very high for these two major artists to be reunited 30 years later. Her performance notwithstanding, Clouds of Sils Maria is a bit of a let down. The cinematography is beautiful but the dialogue is not steady and the metaphor is a bit on the nose. Even though there are innumerable examples of films where the lead actor’s skills far outweigh the thin material, Juliette Binoche deserved a bit more, I believe.
Not only is Clouds of Sils Maria about an aging actress, the film really is about Juliette Binoche. It is interesting to watch her character transform into Helena in the second act. You can see her settle into the character and rage against it all at once. Binoche has a presence, a rareness that is just not seen on screen enough today. She evokes empathy and contempt. Not many people can do this in such an effective manner. Quite frankly, I found her performance even stronger in the scenes without Stewart, which there are few.
The notion of aging female actresses is not new to cinema and Clouds of Sils Maria adds nothing of real note to the conversation here. Rosanna Arquette’s documentary Searching for Debra Winger (2002) might be a better examination of the age-old question of the film industry’s treatment of women over 40. Debra Winger was an iconic actress in the 80s who’s career should have developed through the past few decades. We know that a large part of an actresses’ career is predicated upon their age and appearance. There have been several A-list starlets who have been able to transcend this tired hegemony. Will Chloë Grace Moretz have the longevity that, let’s say, Miles Teller (The Spectacular Now, Whiplash) will have? Only time will tell. It is an issue that needs to be explored but this film offers a mild character study and nothing more.
Naturally, an actress with the career arch of Maria should be offered more than Spanish werewolf films and eyeglass commercials in Latin America. She wants to keep her integrity and all of the benefits that youth offers. Maria has learned many lessons in her long, illustrious career and she will have to learn how to reconcile this conflict. There is a beautiful scene where we watch the clouds of the self-titled mountain town weave in through the mountains like a snake. The metaphor is not lost on the audience. Hopefully, it is not lost on Maria. I do look forward to Assayas and Binoche working together again but with much stronger material and with a cast that can keep stride with Juliette Binoche. Based on the body of her work thus far, that would be a film for the ages.
