Written by Katherine Murray.
Now playing in North America, Clouds of Sils Maria is the Kristen Stewart – Juliette Binoche are-they-or-aren’t-they-lesbians movie that critics have been raving about since Cannes 2014. I wasn’t able to see it at TIFF last year because the tickets sold out fast, but this movie, from writer-director Olivier Assayas, was well worth the wait. It’s thoughtful, well-acted, and everything else you’ve been promised.
Clouds of Sils Maria is a movie about ambiguity – in art, relationships, and our understanding of ourselves. The story follows an actress, Maria (played by Juliette Binoche), who’s been asked to star in a revival of the play that made her famous 20 years ago, this time as the elder of the two main characters. She and her assistant, Val (Kristen Stewart), hole up in Sils Maria, running lines and trying to prepare for the performance. Along the way, Maria must confront her fear of aging, and try to understand the way that her perspective on the play, and on her life, has changed with time.
It sounds like a simple set-up, but the movie draws a lot of complexity from the way that the fictional play, Maloja Snake, parallels Maria’s life. Particularly, it zeroes in on how the relationship between the play’s main characters – a business woman seduced by her scheming assistant, or an assistant seduced by her scheming boss – can be used as a prism to view the relationship Maria has with Val.
It’s a story about two people who share a connection they don’t understand – a connection that could be a lot of things, that we don’t have the words to articulate properly. Are they employer and employee? Are they friends? Does one or the other want more than friendship? Do they even like each other? No one is sure, and that’s part of the point.
The relationships in Maloja Snake are similarly ambiguous. Once the characters start talking about the play, it becomes clear that everyone remembers and interprets the story differently. In some versions, the business woman, Helene, is taking advantage of a young assistant who admires her; in other versions, the assistant, Sigrid, is taking advantage of a woman who envies her youth and beauty. In one interpretation of the story, Helene is really Sigrid herself, 20 years older – the same personality at a different stage in life. Maria’s own interpretation of the play changes depending on which of the characters she’s ask to empathise with. When she played Sigrid, 20 years in the past, she saw depth an humanity in the character – a sympathetic struggle that she doesn’t see now. Asked to take on the role of Helene, she struggles with the character’s vulnerability, trying to find a way to inhabit the role without feeling humiliated.
In one scene, Maria admits that the play’s original director, Wilhelm Melchior, must have seen something in her – must have felt something for her – to cast her as Sigrid, though she can’t define what that feeling was. It seems like it must be the same thing Maria feels for Val – like it’s maybe the same thing Helene feels for Sigrid – a spark of connection that can’t be explained.
Clouds of Sils Maria takes its time exploring these relationships – between Maria and Val, Helene and Sigrid, Helene and the play, as she ages – from several different angles, and always pulls away from giving us an easy answer. It’s too simplistic to say that Maloja Snake is literally the same as what’s happening between Maria and Val. It’s also too simplistic to say that Maria’s relationship with her young co-star – Jo-Ann Ellis, played by Chloë Grace Moretz – mirrors the play, or that Jo-Ann is scheming to steal the spotlight, or that she isn’t. The characters’ motivations are largely left up to interpretation, and writer/director Olivier Assayas resists the urge to over-explain their feelings, instead pulling back to let us draw our own conclusions.
Val and Maria have a professional relationship that’s complicated by something that seems like a friendship, which, in turn, is complicated by resentment, jealousy, impatience, neediness, dependency, and passive-aggression. In some ways, they represent two people, confused about how they feel – in other ways, they represent two different generations butting heads. Maria is dismissive toward Val’s opinions, and proud of herself for not recognizing young celebrities or liking mainstream movies. Val doesn’t seem to think Maria’s a very good actor, and teases her – with varying levels of hostility – for being out of touch. Like Maria at twenty and Maria at forty, they see the world differently, and they’re both convinced that what they see is right.
The really admirable thing about the movie is that it peels back all of those layers without ever telling us who we should side with, or what the story should mean. The message is that we don’t know – that life isn’t a multiple choice test, where you just pick the right answer. Sometimes it’s unclear – sometimes you don’t understand what somebody else is feeling, and sometimes you don’t understand yourself. Sometimes we’re doing the best we can with things that none of us know for certain.
Just in case existential dilemmas about the ambiguity of life aren’t enough to sell you on the movie, here’s the other stuff you need to know:
Is Kristen Stewart actually good in this? Yes. A lot of the time, when we talk about whether an actor’s good in a movie, we’re partially talking about casting – whether or not this role is the right fit for the actor, whether the actor fits in with the rest of the cast, etc, etc. Kristen Stewart isn’t doing anything all that different here from what she usually does, but it works well in this role. Val is supposed to be a bit of a cipher – she plays things close to the chest and masks most of her emotions when she’s around Maria. In the scenes where the characters are running lines, especially, Stewart’s bored, deadpan delivery also works as a perfect counterpoint to Binoche’s take on Maria – an actress who keeps her emotions very close to the surface and seems to be a bit volatile. Stewart also seems much more confident and relaxed in front of the camera than she has in other roles – this is my favourite thing I’ve seen her in.
How pretentious is it really? Not very. It’s more pretentious than a mainstream movie, but less pretentious than a lot of Serious Movies. For the most part, the film’s exploration of ambiguity actually stops it from being pretentious, because the characters aren’t presented as authorities on what’s happening. They can tell you what they think life is about, but part of the point is that you don’t know if you should believe them. There are a couple of moments that remind you you’re watching a Serious Movie but, mostly, you’ll be so caught up in the characters and in trying to solve the puzzle of their relationships, that you won’t mind a little pretention along the way.
Is there anything in it that’s going to offend me? Probably not. Clouds of Sils Maria doesn’t challenge the ideas we have about gender in any significant way, but it does give us a really thoughtful, interesting story about three women – which, in turn, gives three female actors a chance to shine. If you want to dig for something troubling, I offer you this: the movie takes for granted that aging is bad, and that it’s natural for older women to feel threatened by younger ones. We live in a youth-focused culture where a lot of people are afraid to get old, and where a lot of women – especially women in the entertainment industry – have good reasons to feel like their perceived value drops with age. Clouds doesn’t really do anything with that besides acknowledging that it’s so, and that seems like a missed opportunity but, for me, it didn’t detract much from the overall experience.
Was it worth $14 and having to eat concessions snacks for dinner? Yes. It’s a densely packed movie that doesn’t feel tedious to watch, and the scenery in Switzerland is beautiful. Because of the complexity involved in mirroring Maloja Snake to the movie’s plot, it’s also the kind of story you can think about and discuss after watching.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.