The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) – O. Assayas

It’s all talk, largely between Juliette Binoche, an aging actress confronted with age, and Kristen Stewart, as her personal assistant.  The talk can be fascinating (as when the film’s themes tend to break out into the open) or it can be banal (as when the leads deal with contracts, movie offers, and tabloid journalists).  Director Olivier Assayas tried this formula once before in Irma Vep (1996), where Maggie Cheung entered the world of French cinema and we saw the personal relationships in that world from behind the scenes but with an outsider’s viewpoint.  That film is better and takes more exciting risks but The Clouds of Sils Maria also shows Assayas’ planning and control, despite his willingness to dash from here to there often without tying things up with a nice bow.  The relationship between Binoche and Stewart is reflective of (or interwoven with) the script of a play that Binoche has been hired to star in, a play that was her first big break in which she earlier played the younger assertive role against an older vulnerable partner in a lesbian relationship.  Now she must play the older part.  So, we are lost with her in the realms of memory and identity but just as in real life, the film doesn’t really dwell on such things long enough for it to become painful. But the Alps look nice.