Clouds Of Sils Maria

Synopsis: A veteran actress, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) reluctantly agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier, only now playing the older woman.

I have never been a fan of Juliette Binoche or perhaps I was simply turned off her by the films that she made when her career was soaring in the “cinéma du look” ‘90s and she was the go-to girl for anyone who wanted a chic Parisienne.  But in her middle age she has chosen more interesting roles notably in Abbas Kiarostami’s 2010 Certified Copy and more recently, Erik Poppe’s A Thousand Times Goodnight. I’m happy to report that with Clouds of Sils Maria she continues the trend to substantial roles (apparently she approached Assayas with the idea and he wrote the script). Indeed it may be one day cited as the performance of her career.

Binoche’s powerful, protean performance is not however just about her acting chops. It’s also a function of Olivier Assayas’s marvellous script that like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman juggles with the art-imitating-life-imitating-art concept and that gives Binoche a silver platter opportunity to play with her image and reality as an A-list actress. She does it superbly, shifting from at-home unguardedness to red carpet glamour, from vulnerability to smiling façade with the suggestive skills of a true adept.

If Binoche is making outstanding use of a long and very successful career in film, opposite her, relative newcomer Kristen Stewart, only a few years ago the teen starlet of the Twilight franchise, is blazing a remarkable trail. She was strong in Still Alice but she is simply dynamite here as Maria’s P.A., an articulate, independent young woman who, somewhat in the manner of Bergman’s Persona, gets caught up in the maelstrom of Maria’s personal crises.  Binoche is the focal point here but it is Stewart with her intense directness who gives the film real life.  I was less convinced by the choice of Chloë Grace Moretz as the third main actress but in the greater scheme of things this is by-the-by  - the main act is the Binoche-Stewart/Maria-Valentine relationship.  In this respect it is a great pity that Stewart simply disappears from the somewhat more ragged final section of the film

One of the truisms of film is that the script’s the thing and here Assayas’s script (and his own direction of it) is wonderful, as it ranges effortlessly across all manner of issues to do with art and real life, illusion and reality, the culture of celebrity and the cut-throat world of show business.  All this is given a captivating setting with the spectacular Swiss landscape and a particularly poetic resonance with a cloud formation called the Maloja Snake to which the film’s title refers and which is the title of the play Maria is to appear in. My only slight niggle is the use of Pachelbel's already over-exposed 'Canon'.

Clouds of Sils Maria will delight anyone who enjoys “backstage” dramas and let’s face it  - is there a film buff who doesn’t?

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