Clouds of Sils Maria (2015) Movie Critic Review

Drama, Hollywood, Movie Review,

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Clouds of Sils Maria (2015) Movie Critic Review
Runtime:     124 min
Rating:     Rated R for language and brief graphic nudity
Production:     Canal+
Genre:     Drama
Countries:     USA, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland
Languages:     English, German, French, Swiss German
Director:      Olivier Assayas
Stars:        Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz

Clouds of Sils Maria (2015) Critic Review: A veteran actress comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when she agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier.

IMDB By 6.8 : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2452254/

Clouds of Sils Maria Movie Review By MDBReviews  

For some youthful entertainers, blockbusters are the place ability and aspiration go to pass on. For others, as Kristen Stewart, the star of that worldwide juggernaut called the "Nightfall Saga," enormous motion pictures can be a decent place to hang out while they're raking it in. In the great French film "Billows of Sils Maria,"

Ms. Stewart plays an ordinary American abroad, a new-age, pop-savvy Daisy Miller who, with expressive intelligence that few blockbusters allow, makes a passionate argument for the kinds of movies the actress herself is best known for. Ms. Stewart has rightly won a lot of attention for her performance (the French film industry rewarded her with its highest honor, a César), but it would be a mistake to think of this as some sort of career rescue mission.

She plays Valentine, the individual aide to a French motion picture star, Maria Enders, played with euphorically forceful hauteur by Juliette Binoche. Ms. Stewart easily holds both her own and the screen alongside Ms. Binoche, delivering the kind of emotionally translucent performance that first got her noticed as the girl with the guitar in “Into the Wild,” the one with the messy hair and bleeding heart on her sleeve. In the years since, Ms. Stewart hasn’t always been asked to do more than look lovesick or imperiled and she’s picked up some bad habits along the way. (She fidgets like a sugar-jonesing toddler.) Yet despite too many inferior roles, she retains an unalloyed, thin-skinned naturalism that scrapes away at every false note. The writer-director Olivier Assayas hasn’t rediscovered her; she’s always been there.

Divided into chapters, “Clouds” opens with Valentine juggling phones on a commuter train. (Her superpowers include multitasking.) She and Maria are on their way to Zurich, where Maria is to accept an award on behalf of an old mentor, Wilhelm Melchior, a theater genius and filmmaker in the Ingmar Bergman vein. En route, Maria learns that Wilhelm has died, and instead of a celebration she has to prepare for his memorial. She grieves while Valentine flutters about, more butterfly than moth, balancing Maria’s professional commitments with her personal needs and whims. Two decades earlier, Wilhelm had secured Maria’s fortune by casting her in his play and film, “Maloja Snake,” as a young woman who becomes romantically, catastrophically involved with an older woman.

Mr. Assayas, an excitingly restless director who moves among genres as fluidly as he changes up a scene’s mood, likes to cram his films with enough events and actions for three ordinary movies. Some occur in a narratively heightened key — in thrillers like “Carlos” and “Boarding Gate,” which feature gunplay and other violent outbursts — but much of what happens in his films takes place in a recognizable reality. The people are invariably beautiful, the settings sometimes rarefied and the stakes occasionally extraordinary, but never at the expense of Mr. Assayas’s allegiance to real, deeply lived and felt life. That’s one reason he doesn’t build scenes, but prefers to plunge you into events and conversations in progress. Reality doesn’t need a big send-off.

In “Clouds,” Valentine enters talking, before shifting into action to manage Maria’s calendar and life. The details of these initial conversations fade, but what lingers is how Mr. Assayas introduces Ms. Stewart, standing unsteadily in a swaying train corridor with her hair softly framing her face, and how Valentine expertly handles both the phones and Maria. Valentine has said nothing about herself and yet the scene has said plenty. Mr. Assayas occasionally gives his characters cascades of dialogue, some of which push the story forward. Part of his genius, though, is how he marshals ordinary, everyday words and gestures to fill in a character, so that it feels as if the story is organically emerging from them and their world, from desires and actions instead of any ideas about screenwriting.

The story is richly textured with layers of thickening complications, crisscrossing trajectories and increasingly heated, warring motivations. Maria and Valentine travel to Wilhelm’s home in Sils Maria, an area in the Swiss Alps known for its haunting cloud formations and where, in 1881, the idea of eternal recurrence came to Nietzsche “6,000 feet beyond man and time,” as he wrote. As Maria confronts the agony of Wilhelm’s death, she feels the sting of her own mortality: a hot theater director, Klaus (Lars Eidinger), wants to cast Maria in a new production of “Maloja Snake,” this time as the older woman. He wants a young American blockbuster superstar, Jo-Ann (Chloë Grace Moretz, very good), for the part of the younger woman, the same role that catapulted Maria to fame.


Playing the second prompt Ms. Binoche frees Ms. Stewart, who issues herself totally over to her part. Regardless she trembles, maybe wildly, however now every jerk feels like an adjusted, practically jolted reaction to Maria, to the star's devouring requests, her thoughtless affection and neglectful remorselessness. One of the considerable joys of the motion picture is the way Mr. Assayas plays with and afterward subverts the appalling element commonplace from motion pictures like "About Eve," with its vainglorious more seasoned lady bound for a fall, done in by vanity and the scheming more youthful female upstart. The three ladies in "Billows of Sils Maria" love, talk and move, move, move, offering lives, exchanging parts and performing parts. The lives they lead are muddled and uncertain, however each lady's life has a place with her.



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