Self-obsession sees Juliet lost in the clouds

THE CAST and plot of Clouds of Sils Maria immediately grabbed my attention — even though the title did not. Like the movies Rancid Aluminium and To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar, the names offer insufficient clues about the storyline and, as the latter didn’t fit across any cinema marquees, most assumed it was an Ang Lee doc about a Chinese restaurant. Needless to say it wasn’t.

FYI, the clouds of Sils Maria are a natural wonder featuring a snakelike cloud formation (the Majola Snake) which winds its way through an Alpine valley. It’s very impressive visually but I think director Olivier Assayas should have opted for something more user-friendly as the film is really about a famous actress’s struggle with the ageing process and the pressure of being a personal assistant to such an inward-looking woman.

The gorgeous Juliette Binoche plays Maria the A-list star and age has certainly not withered her in the least, though she does a first-class job pretending that it has, and Twilight’s Kristen Stewart, as her personal assistant, is a revelation as I never knew she could act. We meet the duo en route by train to a ceremony where Maria is due to present an award to the director who made her famous. When he suddenly dies, the ceremony becomes a posthumous tribute.

So far so good — or not if you happen to be the dead director who made a film called Majola Snake with Maria as the ingénue. Now a young director intends to remake that film, but with Maria as the older woman driven to suicide by a much younger actress (Chloë Grace Moretz).

The navel-gazing that ensues is relentless and, as good as all the actresses are in their dialoguedrenched scenes, the laments become tedious. Binoche is a brilliant breastbeater but, as with Michael Keaton in Birdman, the actors’ self-obsession is annoying and no amount of cloud formations, however breathtaking, can disguise that fact.