IFC Films
The idea of a play within a play seems radical, but the truth is it’s been around basically forever. People may think of the movies about movies or plays about plays, using the internal story to reflect on the meta-narrative. The play in Hamlet is an obvious one, of course, but that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. If you stretch back, you see old Greek and Sanskrit literature using the idea of a story in a story. Nowadays though, it’s an easy way to seem more intelligent than you are, because “look how smart I’m being.” There’s nothing with the conceit, but there needs to more to it than that. This movie almost gets there.
Clouds of Sils Maria comes from writer-director Olivier Assayas and the name comes from a real life weird cloud phenomenon in the Swiss Alps, near a place called Maloja. Remember that name, it’ll come up in a second. The movie is about older film star Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) who made her big theatre debut starring as a young ingenue/femme fatale in the fictional psychosexual play Maloja Snake. There’s that name again, of course, but that’s because everything in this movie strives to be super-duper symbolic. In the play, Maria played young Sigrid, the assistant of older Helena, who is eventually driven mad and to suicide by the efforts of Sigrid.
Everything in the movie is symbolic after all. tweet
Maria is being asked to come back, but this time to play the role of Helena. So there’s some tension there, bad memories mixed with a parallel with her own career. She’s helped by her personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart of Twilight “infamy”) as they deal with various bits of drama and work on the play in Sils Maria, the place in the Alps of which the film gets its name. That’s a big plus of the movie, stunning cinematography of the mountains, played against a lot of shadowed and dark indoor scenes. Symbolic? Probably. Everything in the movie is symbolic after all.
Back to the play, because I don’t want to give it all away. The new Sigrid will be played by Jo-Anne (Chloë Grace Moretz) one of those talented young starlets who’s always in the tabloids for bad reasons. She’s great, but what game is she playing? And does it mirror the play or does the play mirror reality? That’s a bit of mystery for you, because the movie does the classic “have its cake and eat it too” shtick. You have a long setup in the first act showing the close (too much so?) relationship between Maria and Val, and Maria dealing with the loss of someone she had as a mentor. Slow and twisting, like the Maloja Snake. So it’s a character piece, right?
The second act gets exceptionally meta. tweet
But then the second act gets exceptionally meta, shooting barbs at popular media and superhero movies, also trying to say that they are substantial and without substance, perhaps due to a generational divide. Val is the young hip girl and Maria doesn’t get it. And then there’s the off kilter third act, which I thought didn’t really work. The second act is the strong one in most ways, giving Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart the chance to play beautifully off each other. They’re both excellent here, playing very “types” of characters. But their chemistry seemed genuine. And Chloë Grace Moretz was also very good in her particular kind of foul mouthed, troublesome girl who’s playing everyone.
Or is she? The film doesn’t quite tell you.
The film was both pretentious and not pretentious enough. tweet
In a way, the film was both pretentious and not pretentious enough, or at least I should say it had the desire to be super-duper deep but it really was only kinda deep. I liked it, for the most part, and those shots of the Alps were breathtaking. I think my biggest issue was the confusion between tones for each act. Going from meandering and slow to meta and talky to just pretentious didn’t entirely work for me. So I leave this movie thinking; “It was good, but it could’ve been better.” On the other hand, maybe this will get people to stop thinking Kristen Stewart is a bad actress because of Twilight, and that’s more than enough to support this movie.
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