A meditation on youth and aging
Frustrating, inevitable destiny at centre of Clouds of Sils Maria
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA ★★ ★ ★ 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 swooning close to autobiography with his slender coming-of-age story Something in the Air.
Now Assayas returns with a film whose subject, again, is youth, but brought forward to address a contemporary milieu.
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.
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 its celebrated film adaptation.
Attentive viewers will recognize Maloja Snake — the story of an aging woman’s tumultuous romance with her young assistant — as a transparent imitation of a real play-turned-film, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, 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, Enders is eagerly headed, a young assistant (Kristen Stewart) in tow. The plan is to accept an award on Melchior’s behalf and deliver it to his mountainside home in Sils Maria. But en route she learns Melchior has taken his own life.
That death plunges Maria into the past. So too does the scope of her latest project: a stage revival of 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.
It wasn’t so long ago 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, 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.
Porous borders, layers of artifice, two women dissolving into one: Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is an unavoidable reference point, though the film hardly lingers in its influence. More relevant to its main idée fixe might be The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp — the greatest of all films about aging and time. Clouds shares that epic’s sensitivity to the tragedy of finding oneself out of touch.
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.