Oliver Assayes The Clouds of Sils Maria is a complex meditation on aging that has some of the density of a play by Chekhov or Ibsen. In fact, the movie sometimes seems to be a variant on Ibsen's The Master Builder, albeit from a female perspective. The film is cerebral and relies on a series of emphatic (some might argue overly emphatic) correlations between art and the reality in which art is embedded. The film features Juliette Binoche, as an aging actress, with Kirsten Stewart playing the part of her personal assistant and protégée. The film interweaves three principle thematic strands: the heroine's defiance in the face of age and, then, her resignation, the arrogance of youth, and natural phenomena as signifiers of mortality.
Much of The Clouds of Sils Maria consists of exposition. The situation is complicated by backstories occurring two decades before the events that the film portrays. Juliette Binoche plays an actress named Maria Enders who is internationally famous for her talent and integrity. When she was 18, Enders starred in a film version of a play by man named Wilhelm Melchior, apparently an Austrian or Swiss writer -- it's suggested that the writer is like Thomas Bernhard, a misanthrope hiding in his mountain retreat. Melchior's play was about the toxic relationship between an older woman (Helene) and her protégée Sigrid. In the play, Sigrid seduces the Helene, a bourgeois factory-owner, and ultimately destroys her. Throughout the film, characters argue about what this plot signifies: Enders initially views the story as an account of the sexual connivance and evil of the younger woman; Enders' personal assistant, who is herself a much younger woman, believes that the story is about Helene grasping that she and Sigrid are kindred spirits, both of them open to subversive possibilities. (This is obviously how the personal assistant sees her relationship with the older, famous actress -- she thinks that they are, in effect, sisters of a kind.) Throughout the picture, the meaning of the clash between the generations is debated in various ways -- at the end of the film, a very young director who makes sci-fi pictures about a post-human future pronounces the movie's benediction: "We are all of us all ages at once..." -- that is, what appears as a conflict between young and old is actually a reflection of perpetual combat in our souls between our young and old selves.
The film begins with chill intimations of mortality. Melchior, the playwright, dies on the eve of a commemoration in Zurich in his honor. (In fact, he has committed suicide at a favorite overlook in Sils Maria). Maria is approached by Klaus, a theater director planning to stage Melchior's play, The Snake of Majola, in London -- he wants Maria to play the role of the older woman, a commentary on her previous performance as the 18-year old seductress and, probably, a cynical publicity stunt. (A subtext throughout the film is temptation of cheap publicity, the pursuit of paparazzi, and depredations of the scandal-mongering press.) Maria turns down the part. Even though she despises him, she makes a sexual offer to the man who co-starred in the play with her two decades earlier and who exploited her as a 18 year old girl. He rejects her, inducing an emotional crisis in Maria.
The second and longest act in the film takes place in the Alpine valley at Sils Maria, the place where Nietzsche wrote some of his last books, and a place of almost supernatural splendor. Maria decides to accept the role of the older woman in the play and rehearses the role with her personal assistant. The two women occupy Melchior's house on a high ridge overlooking the glacial lake. This part of the film is like a low-key version of Bergman's Persona -- the women come perilously close to a love affair, it seems, share confidences, and, ultimately, the play that they are rehearsing comes to control their lives. The central metaphor in the film is the so-called "Snake" -- a cloud formation involving a huge tongue of vapor that rolls over a mountain pass from Italy, inundates the valley with roiling fogs, and, then, proceeds like a vast serpent across the surface of the lake. This phenomenon, previewed in a showing of a silent film by the German "mountain-director", Dr. Arnold Fanck, occurs during the climax of this part of the film and coincides with the personal attendant's disappearance from the film. The meaning of this imagery is debatable -- I think the "Snake", appearing as an evanescent river of fog, symbolizes death and inevitable progression of time. (In fact, the silent footage of the Snake made in the late twenties also has the effect of highlighting the notion that cloud formation represents the passage of the years in a human life.)
The third, much shorter part of the movie is a kind of epilogue and focuses on the ruthless cruelty of the principal characters. Maria now has a new personal assistant, also beautiful and briskly efficient, and it is as if the character played by Kirsten Stewart never existed -- there is something ruthless about the way that Maria never mentions the woman who has been in just about every shot in the film up to this point. The famous Hollywood actress recruited to play the part of the conniving femme fatale proves to be as nasty as reputed and disrespects the older woman exactly as Maria feared. Maria meets with the young director to discuss the science fiction film and the Hollywood actress learns that her older boyfriend's wife has tried to commit suicide. This news has an ambiguous cast -- it means that a scandal will attend the show and, probably, enhance its revenues.
The Clouds of Sils Maria is an excellent film with many thought-provoking aspects. It's weakness lies in Juliette Binoche's performance. The actress is simply too highly intelligent for the part and seems, in my view, to be feigning stupidity. Clearly, a woman of this intelligence would understand that she is too old to play the part of Sigrid and would not make herself appear foolish trying to secure that role. The people in the film smoke a lot of cigarettes and drink a lot of wine -- Binoche is fairly convincing with the cigarettes but she is completely implausible as a drunk. Simply put, her imitation of a woman who is giddy with booze is close to embarrassing. In my view, the film would be better with a less self-consciously intelligent actress playing the main role. Kirsten Stewart is excellent as the harried personal assistant and there are many minor roles all impeccably cast and acted. The film is crammed with odd incidents and funny scenes (it's particularly funny to see Binoche wearing 3D goggles to watch the young actress cast as Sigrid in a Hollywood super-hero film). I'm not sure it all adds up but it's fun to try to assemble the pieces.
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