DVD REVIEWS
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA
K (out of 4) The title refers to an actual atmospheric wonder: clouds that slip from Italy through the Swiss Alps, forming an elongated shape known as the Maloja Snake. This Olivier Assayas drama also makes a sinuous approach.
Kristen Stewart’s Val is the efficient personal assistant to Juliette Binoche’s Maria, a big-time movie star. They’re on a train bound for Zurich, where Maria is to accept an award on behalf of the beloved elder playwright who launched her to stardom a quarter century earlier. An urgent communiqué will drastically change how Maria sees herself and how she and Val define their roles: as employer/employee, as women and as humans.
The synaptic relationship between Val and Maria, and later a brash and intrusive young actress played by Chloë Grace Moretz, mimics the hit-and-miss messaging of the film’s opening, set in mountainous terrain. One minute they’re connected and close; the next they’re cut off and distant.
The story isn’t just about three women.
It’s about all women and the conflicting roles they are expected to play in life, more so than men: nurturer/fighter, mother/lover, submissive/dominant and so on.
Assayas unleashes a bundle of female energy, the emotional lightning that surges through his powerful atmospheric metaphor. He just has to stand back and let it rage. Extras include an interview with Assayas. WHITE GOD
(out of 4) Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo downplays White God as a “genre experiment,” but his film has teeth. This winner of the serious Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes 2014, and also the fest’s not-so-serious Palm Dog Award, uses canines as the metaphor for the plight of minorities.
It opens like a mad mutt version of Planet of the Apes. Teenaged protagonist Lili (Zsofia Psotta) is bicycling the streets of Budapest. The scene erupts into terror, as Lili is joined by a pack of howling and running dogs.
The film abruptly shifts into Disney mode. Lili is the lonely child of divorced parents, forced by circumstances to live with her distracted dad (Sandor Zsoter). Her only real friend is her loyal pooch, a gentle crossbreed Labrador named Hagen, who is about to have his own life jolted. He becomes the lab experiment of a brutal captor who wants to turn him into a sharp-fanged competitor in illegal dog fights.
That Planet of the Apes comparison will return, big-time. The oppressed will always rise up against their oppressors — and sometimes their bite really is worse than their bark. Extras include interviews and making-of featurettes. Reviews by Peter Howell