Female lightning bolts surge in complex drama
Clouds of Sils Maria (out of 4) Starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Grace Moretz. Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. At TIFF Bell Lightbox. 123 minutes. 14A In the opening scene of Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, a movie that sneaks up on you like its title vapours, Kristen Stewart is struggling to stay connected.
She’s Valentine, the highly efficient personal assistant to big-time movie star Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche). The two women are on a train headed to Zurich, where Maria is to accept a career achievement award on behalf of the beloved elder playwright who launched her to stardom a quarter century earlier. She was18 then, a few years younger than Val is now.
Val juggles two smartphones, attempting to keep on top of Maria’s voice, email and text messages (including details of an impending divorce) while her boss lounges. The alpine route means spotty cell service. This plus the train’s constant rocking makes communications difficult and unreliable. An urgent communiqué manages to get through. It will drastically change not only the Zurich event, but also how Maria sees herself and how she and Val define their roles: as employer/employee, as women and as humans.
This scene is more useful to understanding the many nuances of Clouds of Sils Maria than the title weather, which refers to an actual atmospheric wonder seen in the film: clouds that slip from Italy through the Swiss Alps, forming a distinctive elongated shape known as the Maloja Snake.
The synaptic relationship between Val and Maria, and later a brash and intrusive young actress played by Chloe Grace Moretz, mimics the hitand-miss messaging of the film’s opening. One minute they’re connected and close; the next they’re cut off and distant.
The easy read of Clouds, my initial one from its Cannes premiere, is that it’s Assayas’ take on All About Eve, that model of artful ambition in which a younger actress connives her way past an older one.
There are certainly elements of this, in how rising stars Stewart and Moretz are situated opposite the Oscar-winning veteran Binoche, and we gain insights into how celebrities treat their personal assistants.
A more apt comparison, confirmed by a second screening, would be Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a psychodrama of identity by a director whom Assayas, an astute student of human behaviour, has acknowledged as an influence.
The knowledge gradually dawns, for both the viewers of and characters within Clouds, that the story isn’t just about three women. It’s about all women, and the conflicting dual roles they are expected to play in life, more so than men: nurturer/ fighter, mother/lover, submissive/ dominant and so on.
Val and Maria run through lines for Maloja Snake, the modernist play that shot Maria to stardom all those years ago, in which a devious younger woman, Sigrid, drives an unsuspecting older one, Helena, to a point of desperation. Where does acting stop and reality begin?
“Everything is hitting me at once,” Maria says.
In a delicious and potentially profitable twist, Maria has been asked to play Helena in a revival of the play. Yet she still feels a strong attachment to Sigrid, a role Moretz’s character Jo-Ann will assume, if Maria agrees to join the cast.
Maria is acutely aware, as is Binoche, that leading roles for women over 40 are scarce in Hollywood and to a lesser extent on Broadway. Can she afford to turn down a primo gig just because it makes her feel old and sad?
Time and entrenched attitudes are relentless, just like those serpentine clouds, which we also see drifting past windows of buildings and cars in Yorick Le Saux’s luminous cinematography.
All three women are aware, to varying degrees, of the expectations imposed upon them to fall in with female archetypes. This includes JoAnn, whose rebellious behaviour springs in part from an unwillingness to be slotted into things, such as that Forbidden Planet remake she’s being pressured to do.
Val is the most complex of the three characters, a role of mysterious motivations that establishes Stewart’s acting ability beyond doubt.
Assayas obviously realized early on with Clouds that he had unleashed a bundle of female energy, the emotional lightning that surges through his powerful atmospheric metaphor. He just had to stand back and let it rage.