Eh bien, ha ha, c’est Burl! I’m here with a recent French
picture, Clouds of Sils Maria, which
comes from Olivier Assayas, the fellow who brought us Irma Vep! I really should watch Irma
Vep again one of these days – I had a fine time seeing this one by myself
in the movie house when it was released those many years ago, then walking home
in the rain humming “Bonnie & Clyde” to myself the whole way! Ha ha,
memories!
But it’s Clouds of
Sils Maria I’m here to talk about today, and this picture is something of
an echo of that earlier Assayas joint! Juliette “Godzilla” Binoche, who apparently provided the original idea for
the picture, stars as an aging superstar actress taking part in a tribute to
the writer of Maloja Snake, a play
about the romantic power dynamics between an older and a younger woman! This is
the play that made Binoche’s character a star many years earlier when she
played the ingénue role! Ha ha!
But things have changed and continue to quickly change! The
venerated playwright kicks the bucket, the tribute becomes a memorial, and
Maria, our older actress, is offered the older-lady role in a new production of
Maloja Snake! She holes up in the
stunning mountaintop aerie owned by the late playwright and begins running lines
with her personal assistant Val, played by Kristin Stewart of American Ultra! Of course the
relationship between Maria and Val mixes and blurs with that of the characters
they’re reading, and this is further complicated by the troubled young starlet,
played by Chloe Grace-Moritz, who is cast in the younger role!
So you can see there are a lot of games going on in the
situations and even in the casting, ha ha! Some of them work and others fall
flat, or are a bit too obvious, but one gets caught up in the scenario
nonetheless! Of course aging and the perceptions that come with it are major
themes, and one offshoot of this is the curiously hefty amount of screen time
given to scenes of Val trying to convince Maria that blockbuster Hollywood
pictures can contain the same thematic and emotional weight as any rarified art
film or theatre play! Ha ha, and I guess this is what leads to a mysterious
disappearance late in the picture!
The phenomenon alluded to in the titles of both the film and
the play-within-the-film provides one of the picture’s strongest moments! The
Maloja Snake is a ribbon of low-drifting cloud that winds its way through the
mountains near the playwright’s lovely home, and though the characters don’t
see it, we do, and it’s a pretty good trick effect too, I must say!
The movie has a few longeurs,
and I can’t say I wanted these characters as my new best friends, but the
picture is engaging and the acting strong! It also appears to have been shot on
film (by Yorick Le Saux, who also shot Only Lovers Left Alive), and it looks great! It’s of course a picture in the tradition of Persona and Cries and Whispers, but I don’t think it quite rises to the level
of those marvelous classics, its high-altitude location notwithstanding! Ha ha,
I’m going to give Clouds of Sils
Maria two and a half pairs of granny panties!
This is one of those arty films that places itself in opposition to Hollywood blockbusters, but its presentation of its great rival is a wonky one. The clips of the films within the film that are supposed to be these huge franchises just look weird and not anything even Transformers fans would flock to see, which undermines the superiority Assayas and Binoche apparently feel to the product from across the Atlantic.
ReplyDeleteDid they make Hollywood representative Stewart disappear as a form of punishment? It certainly looks kind of petulant. This got a lot of praise, but I thought there were better French movies around at the time.
Ha ha, I assumed they made the sets, uniforms and trick effects in the "blockbuster" clip we see deliberately cheesy, and further assumed that much of Stewart's dialogue about how complex the young starlet's performances and persona actually are is her (and Assayas) cleverly repurposing comments she's heard about herself! Maybe I'm giving the picture and its makers more credit than they deserve, but I've always felt kindly disposed toward Assayas and the Euro-casual vibe he's able to create in his pictures!
ReplyDeleteYeah, I like Assayas too, he takes chances (I even defend Demonlover which was a lot more interesting than too many people thought) but here he just seemed snobby. Maybe it was the influence of Binoche? Was her arch-enemy Gerard Depardieu right about her all along?! Oh well, it did look nice, the faux blockbuster aside.
ReplyDelete