Olivier Assayas (2014)
Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is a famous stage and screen actress, now in middle age. Her international career was launched, twenty years ago, when she appeared in ‘Maloja Snake’, the work of a Swiss playwright called Wilhelm Melchior. At the beginning of Clouds of Sils Maria, Maria is travelling to Zurich with her young American assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), to collect, on behalf of the reclusive Melchior, some kind of lifetime achievement award. Maria intends, the day after the ceremony, to visit her friend Melchior to hand the award over: his home is in Sils Maria, in the Swiss Alps. During the train journey to Zurich, she learns that he has died suddenly. The award-giving goes ahead and, although Maria is distressed by the news of Melchior’s death, so does her appearance at the event. While she’s there, she’s approached by Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), a big-name theatre director, who wants to stage a revival of ‘Maloja Snake’ in London. The play is about the relationship between two women, the middle-aged (and vulnerable) Helena and the much younger (and hard-hearted) Sigrid. Two decades ago, Maria Enders was Sigrid and her acting was acclaimed as a breath of fresh air beside that of the actress playing Helena. That character commits suicide in ‘Maloja Snake’ and the superannuated performer who played her followed suit in real life. Now Maria is being offered the role of Helena and Sigrid is to be played by Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz), the star of a Hollywood superheroes franchise and notorious for her public misbehaviour. Yet Jo-Ann is, according to Klaus Diesterweg, ‘more interesting’ than her reputation would lead you to think. Maria initially refuses Klaus’s invitation but she soon has second thoughts.
The writer-director Olivier Assayas divides Clouds of Sils Maria into three parts – which he labels parts one and two and ‘epilogue’. The plot synopsis above covers part one, which is the strongest section of the film. The interactions of the star actress and her PA are absorbing from the start: Maria relies on Valentine, who’s evidently good at her job; Maria keeps checking things are as they should be, and, in spite of her manifest admiration for Maria, tiny flickers of irritation register in Valentine’s assurances that they are. In the scenes describing preparations for, and what’s happening at the margins of, the Zurich ceremony, we watch the performances of people expert in putting on appropriate faces. These experts include not only professional role-players like Maria and Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), the ‘distinguished’ elderly actor who’s also there to pay tribute to Wilhelm Melchior, and whom Maria can’t stand. The theatre director too, when he’s trying to persuade Maria to play Helena, shows skill in the art of subtly forceful ingratiation. It’s a good moment when Maria, after her backstage misgivings about appearing at the ceremony, switches easily into engagement with it, on cue and in response to audience applause.
From the start of part two, the film becomes more obvious. Juliette Binoche’s appearance has changed, as Maria starts preparing for the new production of ‘Maloja Snake’: her hair is cropped short to play the lesbian Helena, and to signal the potential connections between the character and Maria’s anxious, no longer young self. The themes are very clear and Clouds of Sils Maria becomes, for the most part, a series of repeated illustrations of them – the themes don’t develop. Assayas explores various relationships between characters in his story and in the play-within-the-film:
- Helena and Sigrid vs Maria and Valentine
- Helena and Sigrid vs Maria and Jo-Ann Ellis
- Valentine vs Jo-Ann
- how Maria sees the character of Helena now, compared with twenty years ago
- the fate of the actress who first played Helena and Maria’s superstitious fears about suffering a similar fate … etc.
The bullet-pointing is intentional because the combinations come across as schematic, as formal permutations rather than rich resonances, and the fact you could have put money on this happening is part of the disappointment of Clouds of Sils Maria. Michael Wood is right, in his London Review of Books piece (7 May 2015), that Assayas’s film ‘doesn’t escape the blight that awaits almost all works of art within works of art: they become just metaphors for something else.’ This isn’t to say that the players are uninteresting to watch, especially when Maria is learning Helena’s lines and Valentine is on the book and reading Sigrid’s lines. Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart express the proximity of what Helena/Sigrid are scripted to say to what Maria/Valentine may be saying in their minds. It’s fascinating – but it’s a technical fascination, a matter of watching two gifted actresses blurring life-art boundaries between the story’s characters. There are also, of course, correspondences between the main actors in the film and its scenario. Kristen Stewart, although never a Lindsay Lohan figure, has had to convince critics she’s more than they might have guessed from the Twilight series. There’s a fine bit when Maria and Valentine have been to see one of Jo-Ann Ellis’s movies and argue about it afterwards, with Valentine spiritedly articulate in her defence of Jo-Ann’s acting talent, and in defiance of Maria’s giggling derision. You can’t help wondering if this section of dialogue was especially meaningful to Kristen Stewart – just as you can’t help being reminded, as you watch Clouds of Sils Maria, that she, rather than the multi-award-winning Juliette Binoche, received a César for her performance in the film. Because these points of connection are less cut-and-dried than the bullet points, they’re eventually more suggestive than most of the relationships in the film – although the lesbian feelings that Maria may have for Valentine and/or Valentine may have for Maria are an exception: Assayas and his two leads keep this aspect relatively opaque and capable of different interpretation.
Wilhelm Melchior’s play ‘Maloja Snake’ is named for a meteorological phenomenon in the Swiss Alps. This is described by Robbie Collin in the Daily Telegraph as a ‘strange cloud formation that slips up, serpent-like, from the Italian lakes and pours along the mountain pass by the village of Sils Maria, before dissipating on the lower valley slopes’. It serves a dual purpose in the film. First, Olivier Assayas uses the cloud formation and their Alpine backdrop to supply a visual counterbalance to what is a very talky piece of cinema. Second, the Maloja Snake is metaphorically supple. Since it’s a transient effect in a continuing landscape, it can express the ephemerality of human life in the context of natural history. But the serpentine clouds are also described, at one point, as revealing what ‘really’ lies beneath them. In other words, they cause the landscape’s features to be seen in an unusual way and to become more noticeable as a result (the ‘snake’ of Melchior’s inventions exposes the personalities of the actors playing his characters). I preferred this meaning of the clouds to the other one because the juxtaposition of imposing, enduring nature and human insignificance struck me as particularly tired. It was an accident of timing but Clouds of Sils Maria was the fourth film I’d seen in nearly as many weeks to wheel out this idea – after Jauja, Force Majeure (the Alps again) and the 1967 Far From the Madding Crowd. The last-mentioned does it best: that it did it nearly half a century ago (and reflected a novel published nearly a century earlier) underlines the lack of originality of Lisandro Alonso, Ruben Ostlund and Assayas in making the point again.
The film’s epilogue is overlong and melodramatic (and you also miss Kristen Stewart, Valentine having by now departed the scene: she leaves Maria on a mountainside, so that the frightened older woman can desperately call her vanished assistant’s name into the echoing vast and void). This final section gives the impression of Assayas feeling more needed to happen in the story and packing it in late. Jo-Ann’s current boyfriend is a prize-winning British novelist called Chris Giles (Johnny Flynn): his artist wife, traumatised by her husband’s affair, attempts suicide and the story hits the press just as rehearsals for ‘Maloja Snake’ in London are about to begin. Jo-Ann’s reaction is remarkably callous; it has to be, so as to chime with Sigrid’s cruelty in the play, but it damages the film in two ways. It’s rather a letdown when Jo-Ann is revealed in her true Hollywood brat colours – since Chloe Grace Moretz has, until now, succeeded in making her (as Klaus Diesterweg said she was) more interesting than expected. More important, the attempts to shield Jo-Ann from paparazzi only make you realise that casting someone with her public profile would have risked eclipsing the production even without the added controversy of what happens to the boyfriend’s wife.
This in turn underlines the improbability of Maria’s agreeing to appear in a production liable to be condemned, with Jo-Ann in the cast, as a piece of crude commercial calculation. It’s improbable chiefly because there’s never any doubt that Wilhelm Melchior means a great deal to Maria, and that she has a special place in his and his wife Rosa’s affections. (It’s to Maria alone that Rosa (Angela Winkler) reveals that her husband didn’t die of natural causes but took his own life.) Olivier Assayas is so determined in these closing stages to show life imitating art that he includes things that ignore context. For example, Maria fearfully suggests to Jo-Ann that Sigrid register Helena’s presence on an exit line (so that the audience doesn’t also ignore Helena) and explains that this is what she (Maria) did in the original production. Jo-Ann delivers a crushing, that-was-then-this-is-now riposte but she’d more likely tell Maria she’s playing the moment the way the very much in-charge Klaus Diesterweg wants it played.
Most of the film’s dialogue is in English. This sometimes creates an odd effect – as if you’re hearing the sometimes awkward English that appears in subtitles to a foreign language film – but Assayas shows a lot of skill in differentiating the English spoken by the continental European characters from that of the American and British ones. His use of predominantly classical music (mainly Handel and Pachelbel) to score the film isn’t so successful. Its effect is to confirm Assayas’s estimation of his themes as very important ones – and to make you rather sympathise with what Jo-Ann Ellis says after listening, in the tea room of the posh hotel where she’s about to meet Maria Enders for the first time, to a string quartet.
19 May 2015