On youth and aging
Film wrestles with frustrating, inevitable process of growing old
Clouds of Sils Maria out of 5 Starring: Kristen Stewart, Juliette Binoche Directed by: Olivier Assayas Running time: 124 minutes
When last we enjoyed the company of the incomparable Olivier Assayas, we found him receding, a bit dreamily, into a reverie of nostalgic reminiscence, swooning close to autobiography with his slender coming-of-age story Something in the Air. The setting was the Paris of the director’s teenage years — in the wake of the student protests of May 1968.
Now Assayas returns with a film with youth once again its subject, but brought forward to address a contemporary milieu: political strife exchanged for celebrity scandal, activism exchanged for self-promotion, blackjacks exchanged for BlackBerrys.
As counterweight Assayas has added Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a French actress looming perilously close, as she sees it, to the wasteland of middle age. It’s from this vantage that Clouds of Sils Maria stares down our curious modern travails.
In show business parlance, Maria Enders was “discovered” in her late teens by esteemed playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who in the early 1980s cast Maria as star of both his play Maloja Snake and the celebrated film adaptation he directed soon after its première. The success of both made Maria a star.
Attentive viewers will recognize Maloja Snake, the story of an aging woman’s tumultuous (and intermittently unrequited) romance with her young assistant, as a transparent imitation of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, itself a play before it became a film, which I suppose would make Wilhelm Melchior a thinly veiled Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
But unlike Fassbinder, Melchior, quite straight, lived a long, quiet life in the Swiss Alps — where, as Clouds of Sils Maria begins, Maria Enders is eagerly headed, a young assistant of her own in tow. The plan is to accept an award on Melchior’s behalf in Zurich and deliver it the next day to his mountainside home in Sils-Maria. But en route she receives grim news: Melchior has taken his own life.
Melchior’s death plunges Maria into the past. So too does the scope of her latest project: a stage revival of none other than Maloja Snake, in which she has been persuaded to appear, though this time in the elder role. There’s a shade of A Star is Born in the reversal, of course, cruelly emphasized by the arrival of Maria’s new co-star Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), a lightning bolt of juvenile vigour.
For Maria, and at first we sense too for Assayas, Jo-Ann seems vaguely emblematic of something: millennial inanity, perhaps, or maybe just a canny sense of how a public image ought to be cultivated and shrewdly maintained.
Through Jo-Ann’s eyes Maria sees herself, alarmingly, as old, on the other side of a generation gap that now seems impassably vast. It wasn’t so long that Maria was quite literally in Jo-Ann’s role. She recalls distinctly how she saw her older co-star: surely, Maria thinks, that isn’t what she’s become.
Enlisted to ward off this fear is Valentine (Kristen Stewart), Maria’s indispensable assistant and, as the return of Maloja Snake nears, her makeshift co-star in practice.
Valentine, almost a caricature of young and sexy and cool, slips all too easily into the part of the play’s deadly ingenue, and the inevitable comparisons render Valentine and Maria’s formerly congenial rapport suddenly fraught.
Secluded together at Melchior’s house in the middle of the Alps, the pair spar wildly in character and out; Assayas, delighting in the cleverness of his construction, keeps making us wonder, for a few maddening moments at a time, whether each new charged encounter is from the pages of Maloja Snake or the watermark of real-life fury shining through.
What are the clouds of Sils Maria? We’re informed early on. Melchior’s widow, taking Maria to the crest of the mountain where her husband died, points to the spot on the horizon from which Maloja Snake derived its name: it’s here that the intriguing “snake,” a “cloud formation, partially unexplained,” winds through the valley, in and around the mountains, “like a serpent.”
Back at the house she shows Maria and Valentine an educational video about the phenomenon — one Melchior watched often, his widow explains, because in these images “the true nature of the landscape reveals itself.”
The revelation of a true nature proves to be among the film’s richer themes. And the “snake,” unsurprisingly, emerges as a stirring motif, not least in the respect that it remains “partially unexplained.”
Indeed. Toward the end of Clouds of Sils Maria the place of Melchior’s death yields a provocative mystery, and one that goes pointedly unsolved.
Like aging, the mystery feels both frustrating and inevitable. There was, you feel, no other way. Youth is invariably swallowed up by a world that can’t long accommodate it. The film concludes that the best you can hope for is to survive with a bit of wisdom intact.