Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Grace Moretz are three of the greatest actresses working today. Between the three of them, they have generated billions in box office success. Love them or hate them, everyone has to agree that they are a triumph with the masses. All three of them appear in the new film by Oliver Assayas titled Clouds of Sils Maria.
The story is told in three parts. The first part takes place on a train. Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is an actress who has had a successful long vocation as a performer. She has been tasked to accept an award for the writer/director who started her career. He is a recluse who has been writing dark plays. Kristen Stewart plays Valentine, her young assistant. The woman is a bit frumpy but quite focused on keeping Maria in the loop of social media. She balances the bigger outside world with the very inner world of Maria. Chloe Grace Moretz is hot, young actress Jo-Ann. She has been cast in a revival of a play that started the career of Maria. The producers want Maria to return to the play but as the role of the older woman. That means that Maria has come full circle in her career. She is a bit taken aback to be offered the ‘older’ role.
Then she finds out that the playwright has died. This is a devastating blow for Maria, to have a man who has crafted her career now be gone leads to her having to reevaluate her life. The bulk of the film takes place in the Swiss Alps where Maria is working on her lines with Valentine. We know that it takes place some time later because Maria has a new shorter haircut. As she spews the lines of the older, love-broken lesbian, Valentine is becoming a personification of the young vixen. The more the two read together, the more of a dynamic between the them emerges. But are they reading lines or is there something more to their interaction? The last act unfolds when the play is being performed and Maria has the realization that her life has in fact gone full circle. She is now the character of the desperate older woman in a new generation of actors has taken over the world.
This film is navel gazing to a high degree, the kind of pretentious overwrought work that only the faux intelligent find fascinating. Over and over again director Oliver Assayas shows us exactly what many may already believe, that actresses can be a pretentious lot of spoiled over-pampered babies. Of the three leads, only Juliette Binoche shows any fire. It might be because she is the central focus of the piece, of perhaps her being the most senior of the three performers. Either way, she gives the more interesting reading of our actress guild. Where usually Chloe Grace Moretz gives some fire to a role, this is the most pedestrian of performances. One wants to see her grow up into more sophisticated roles, but more along the lines of Elizabeth Taylor not Lindsay Lohan. And Kristen Stewart, well, she may (sadly) never recover from Bella.
Art house films have always had a degree of being ‘better than you’ when playing in the theaters. Clouds of Sils Maria does not fit that mold. This is one best missed.
