Acima das Nuvens

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.

I was very glad that i attended the opening ceremony of the Beirut International Film Festival with the presence of Juliette Binoche screening this touching movie! We're talking here about a festival movie so if you're not ready for a lot of talking scenes, well this is not for you! The story itself is brought by Binoche to director Olivier Assayas about an actress at the peak of her career who is asked again to play a role in a play that made her famous years ago! Let's be clear: this movie is all about stunning performances by a great Trio of actresses Binoche, Stewart and Moretz! Everyone was so great performing the characters. Binoche made it clear that this movie talk about her career and how can it be disturbed or touched emotionally on every level when she'll reach a certain age and when new generations of actors will rise! A must see for cinema lovers and especially for professional actors!

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.

If you are a big fan of Magritte and Escher, of the writer Sebald, of Pirandello and Philip Glass and maybe the film "Koyaanisqatsi", I predict that you will love this film. If, on the other hand, you can't see the point of any of these and believe only in Aristotle's six elements of drama, there are many other excellent films you will like much better. It's a matter of taste.

In this film, writer/director Assayas deliberately blurs the distinctions between a number of levels. You start with people in the business of theatre and film: Marie Enders (Binoche), an experienced and celebrated actress, and Valentine (Stewart), her young, busy, competent personal assistant, and the people in Marie's past, living and dead.

Then there is the level of the characters in the play "The Maloja Snake" of twenty years ago, when Marie played the young and cruel Sigrid who loved and crushed her middle-aged employer, Helena. There is the level of the characters of the same play today, in which director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger) hopes to recruit Marie to play Helena, possibly with a different take on the characters' motives and psychology, and in which Jo-Ann Ellis (Moritz) is eventually cast as Sigrid.

And there is also the level of the real human world, including events in the life of the real Kristen Stewart, which have striking parallels in the life of the fictional Ellis; the same seems to be true of Binoche and Enders, and I have read that "The Maloja Snake" is a parallel world version of Fassbinder's "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant".

Spanning all these levels are the the real Switzerland and its real mountains and clouds, including the real Maloja Snake, a cloud phenomenon which was the subject of a black-and-white short film in the 1920's which is excerpted in Assayas' film and which can be seen on YouTube. The Internet spans all these levels too, and all the characters in the film are busy with texting and Skyping and Googling and checking out and fixing their IMDb info.

And then the work of playing characters, of determining and managing emotions, of arguing about what really motivates real or fictional or play-within-a-play fictional characters, either within the industry of the creative arts or not, also bridges the levels. We are constantly aware of the analogies and reflections among Valentine - Maria, Sigrid - Helena, Jo-Ann - Maria, and so on. Readings of lines take place, in which you sometimes wonder what level you are on, and we see a lot of the details of the creative discussions which must go into the production of plays or for that matter, not incidentally, movies such as "Clouds of Sils Maria". If you get lazy and suspend your disbelief and allow yourself to mentally presume that "Clouds" is a comprehensible narrative of the real world, Assayas will bring you up short without any ceremony.

So, does that kind of thing strike you as artistically intriguing or intellectually exciting? If it does, see the movie. It will give you a lot to think about and appreciate and puzzle about and discuss afterward. (The Swiss tourist board will thank you also.) If it seems a bit dry and abstract, well, you are fairly warned.

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.