Sils Maria

Greetings again from the darkness. Most of us don't spend much time re-living our past, and we certainly don't go through the emotional turmoil of analyzing our early lives from a different perspective. This story puts actress Maria (Juliette Binoche) in those shoes and then we watch as she fights, claws and battles her way through.

Maria is a well-respected veteran actress who has been offered a role in the revival of the play that made her a star more than 20 years earlier. The play was written by her mentor, who dies suddenly as she is on her way to visit. Hotshot director Klaus (Lars Eidinger) wants Maria for the role of the older woman, and this is difficult for Maria to accept since she played what she considers the far more interesting younger woman in the first version. Internal psychological warfare breaks out.

Maria's personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) struggles to keep Maria informed of today's world – celebrity gossip is especially key in their conversations. They also run lines together, and the parallels between the play and their real lives are so prevalent that the lines are often blurred between written word and spoken word. Things get really dicey when Jo-Ann (Chloe Grace Moretz) enters the picture as the talented, extremely popular, personally out of control actress slated to play opposite Maria in the play.

These three actresses are exceptional … yes, even you Kristen Stewart haters will be impressed. They each bring extraordinary depth to their role, and all are a bit outside of what would be considered their comfort zone. Their exchanges are fun, but what's not said is every bit as exciting and key.

Filmed in the Sils Maria area of the Alps, the landscape is beyond breathtaking. Maloja Snake is the title of the play, and it refers to the fantastic cloud formations that snake through the peaks and valleys of this marvel of nature. The scenery is a nice complement to the emotional rides each of the characters take, and writer/director Olivier Assayas ensures that we have no shortage of talking points after the film.

Rehearsing for a revival of the play that made her famous proves unexpectedly challenging for an esteemed actress in this French drama starring Juliette Binoche. While she knows all the dialogue, the difficulty is being asked to the play the older of the two protagonists (a la Michael Caine assuming the Laurence Olivier role in the remake of 'Sleuth'). Further tensions arise as the older protagonist is manipulated by the younger one in the play with Binoche wondering how close she may be to the older character. Fascinating as all this might sound, the film is nevertheless hard to get through at times with the plot not really taking off until 40 minutes in when Binoche views online clips of her bratty co-star to-be and tries to rehearse knowing what her co-star is like. At its best, the film blurs reality as Binoche and her personal assistant practise with it often ambiguous whether the pair are really fighting or simply rehearsing. There are also some memorable bits as the pair discuss whether science fiction dramas can have merit and the notion that "thinking about a text is different to living it", but these sparks unfortunately fizzle out before the film is over. As others have observed, the movie has a curious meta quality with Binoche playing an actress character very similar to herself, but the protracted first forty and final fifteen minutes oddly leads the film succeeding best in its middle section.

Fantastic work from both Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. The latter showed some more naturality in Still Alice and here she has a lot more screen time and is pretty great throughout. It's not an incredibly showy performance, though, not like Binoche's, but I could get behind it for awards love. Chloe Moretz's empty, superficial acting style actually works perfectly for her character here. I doubt it was really much work for her, but it works and she's not a distraction like she usually is. Juliette Binoche is amazing, as always. I could've seen her actually gaining traction for this film (had it been released near the end of the year). The film as a whole is... really weird. It's very entertaining throughout, never once dull, but it feels sort of aimless the more it goes on and while I get what points it was trying to make, it just felt a little too scattered to truly be great.

We witnessed the kinetic energy of the Oscar-winning Birdman about an aging actor making a comeback on the Broadway stage. Now with the expert and engaging Clouds of Sils Maria we witness a middle-aged actress, Maria (Juliette Binoche), contend with both her 20-year return to the same play but as the older character and the energy of a personal assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), that reminds Maria of time's passage and the changes in her profession.

Writer/director Olivier Assayas delights us with stunning camera work in an early sequence on the train;Hitchcock would love the camera and editing if you remember Strangers on a Train. Assayas also features the Alps with such loving cinematography you'll be booking a trip. Credit Yorick Le Saux for the editing and Marion Monnier for cinematography.

The heart of an excellent drama such as this is its words, the best way to convey the complex emotions each actress must display. Besides Binoche's up-close glamour, Kristin Stewart's sassy, dark beauty is there to remind us that youth rules.

The screenplay offers advice about the changing nature of dynamic dialogue: "The text is like an object. It's gonna change perspective based on where you're standing." (Valentine). In the case of Maria and Valentine, the sometimes screwball-comedy-like repartee reveals layers of perception and emotion heightened by the fact that we are witnessing the deconstruction of the acting experience: Maria holds to classical interpretation while Valentine's thesis is that spontaneity and electricity are the key components.

The plot of Maria's accepting a stage role for a play she acted in 20 years ago as the young lead loosely parallels the scenario of this film (young assistant provoking the older actress) until a climactic moment on the mountain, a moment whose ambiguity will demand you complete the scene for yourself. Regardless, you will know you have seen one of the best films of the year depicting the rigorous working of the art of acting given by two of the best actresses today in film (Stewart won a Cesar for this role, Binoche won an Oscar for English Patient, and a mature Chloe Grace Moretz is sure to be Oscar nominated soon!).

Ambiguity is the key world of this film. You are the major actor in the sense that your interpretation makes the film. Each scene is so ambiguous that you can always interpret it in various manners so in the end _you_ are the director. When Maria and Val work on the text, rehearse the play, the feelings are so mingled that you are the one who decide if they are those of Helena- Sigrid or rather Maria-Val. Reality is entangled. I loved the Alps hiking shots and overall the mysterious Maloja snake. I would have rated it a 9 to the Writer-Director Olivier Assayas but reduced it to a 8 because I was disappointed in Juliette Binoche's performance. She is usually better than in this film, it is as if she didn't feel like acting this character, a bit like what happens in the film itself. At several occasions her laugh is artificial and fake. She is obviously ill at ease in this character, which proves what I wrote before about entangled reality between the film itself and the play prepared in the film. I'm not sure I am very clear but those who have seen and felt/perceived the movie as I, will understand.