What happens in “Clouds of Sils Maria,” the new film from Olivier Assayas? Well, it starts on a train, where a celebrated actress of stage and screen, Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), accompanied by Valentine (Kristen Stewart), her personal assistant, is heading to Zurich. There she is scheduled to attend a tribute to a playwright named Wilhelm Melchior, but the plan is thrown awry by the news, en route, that Melchior has died. Nonetheless, the tribute goes ahead, after which the two women meet with his widow, Rosa (Angela Winkler), at her house in the Swiss mountains. She invites them to stay there while she is away. Years before, Melchior wrote a play, “Maloja Snake,” about a female corporate boss who has an affair with a manipulative young woman in her office—originally played by Maria. Now, in middle age, she has been asked to revisit the work, on the London stage, in the role of the older woman, like a Gertrude who was once an Ophelia. And so, at high altitude, Maria rehearses her lines, with Valentine reading the other part, in Melchior’s home and on lung-filling hikes through the hills.
If this sounds peculiar, brace yourself for the movie, which is the most disorienting that Assayas has yet devised. The giddiness infects his characters. Valentine drives around so many hairpin bends that she has to get out and throw up, while the soundtrack—which rings elsewhere with stately excerpts of Handel and Pachelbel—assaults us with Primal Scream. Then there is the uncertainty as to whether the dialogue belongs to the play or to Maria and Valentine themselves; often, we cannot tell where their fictional relationship ends and their real one begins. “What do I need to do to make you admire me?” Maria asks, and the question drifts like smoke. When, in a rush of rage, she sweeps everything off a table and stalks out of the room, the camera flinches from such a raw display, only for Valentine to check her copy of the play and recite the stage directions: “ ‘She takes a deep breath, regains her composure.’ ” Not that the confusion stops when other people speak, since what comes out of their mouths has the clunk of the overwritten: “Her conventional style of acting highlighted the modernity of your performance”; “Tastes can get worn out, kind of like desire.” Almost the whole movie is in English, but we seem to be trapped inside a badly translated foreign novel, with no escape.
Yet this strong scent of unreality, which will send many viewers reeling, does have a purpose to fulfill. After all, this is a movie about acting, and about the boundaries that divide it from the rest of life. Assayas also reminds us that the orbit of dramatic stars, up at Maria’s level, is unreal: a spooky round of photo shoots, festivals, limousines, shifting schedules, and whims no sooner vented than indulged. Her first duty, on learning of Melchior’s demise, is to meet a press officer from Chanel and try on an evening gown, as if that were a natural way to mourn; you can either squirm at the product placement or treat it as an accurate account of a stylishly malformed moral world. Hence the need for Valentine, forever juggling her phones, and batting away the swarm of ludicrous roles that keep being offered to Maria. “There’s a Spanish horror flick, it’s pretty gory, you’d be playing a Mother Superior,” she reports.
Solving a problem like Maria, however, is no sweat compared with the task of handling Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz). She is a rising actress, which means that nothing is more avidly awaited than her fall; the Internet is alive with her meltdowns. But the director of “Maloja Snake” sees something in her, and wants her to play the young seductress, opposite Maria. In a typical Assayas move, we jump without warning to a clip from Jo-Ann’s latest blockbuster, in which she wears a shiny maroon spacesuit and says things like “Zargon is not a mutant, but he understands mutant desire.” Valentine, being of the Jo-Ann generation, is keen to extoll her talents. “She goes deep into the darker side of her character,” she tells Maria, over drinks. Maria is much amused by this studious fan talk, and laughs so hard that she blows the foam off her beer.
Is there a better laugh than Binoche’s? Dirty, rich, and Rabelaisian, it’s a crucial corrective to the rarefied dolor for which directors prize her—no wonder, for her face is milk pale and schooled for sorrow, like a Madonna’s. The movie studies her intently, as if waiting for her to give away something that will not be yielded in conversation. (Especially when she speaks English; to be fluent and to be at ease in the tongue are scarcely the same thing.) I felt the lack of that intentness recently, as I watched her play Antigone, in a new translation of Sophocles by Anne Carson; the stage production has been touring Europe, and will come to BAM, in the fall. Binoche, predictably, drew the crowds, and the eye, as she blazed with the desperate piety that the heroine demands. But one wanted that eye, so badly, to be a camera, pulling us into the naked flame.
As for Sils Maria, what is it? I find it hard to believe that the place exists, despite having been there. It lies in southeast Switzerland, near the fur-lined luxury of St. Moritz, where a gallery, as I passed through, was mounting a show titled “Sylvester Stallone: 35 Years of Painting.” As I say, unreal. Things get doubly weird as you head along the valley to Sils Maria and climb to the Hotel Waldhaus, where the list of former guests runs, in ascending philosophical order, from Hermann Hesse and Primo Levi to Jung and Einstein, all the way up to Rod Stewart. You can still take tea there to the strains of live chamber music, and that is what we hear when Jo-Ann, in Assayas’s film, appears at the hotel. Some people, defying Einstein, like to live as if time had stopped.
Two other things lure people, like pilgrims, to Sils Maria. One, as the title suggests, is clouds, and the twist of nature that sends them funnelling between peaks into a thin, transcendent stream: the Maloja Snake of the play. (Assayas has unearthed lovely footage of the phenomenon, from 1924.) The second attraction is the house, now a museum and study center, where Nietzsche spent many fruitful summers: “Here one can live well, in this strong, bright atmosphere, here where nature is amazingly mild and solemn and mysterious all at once,” he wrote. That is precisely the climate that Assayas wants to summon for the movie, and we feel it acutely as Maria and Valentine embark on their regular treks. Here is the true high life—“6,000 feet beyond people and time,” as Nietzsche said, and a rebuff to the ersatz variety in which Maria and her kind, not just in the movie business, and not just in Europe, are consumed.
But the new film is not a satire, or a broadside. It has none of the skittishness that leavened “Irma Vep” (1996), Assayas’s comedy about a director trying, against farcical odds, to remake a silent classic of early French cinema. The result was as light-footed as a cat burglar, whereas “Clouds of Sils Maria” proceeds with a graver tread. In one respect, though not a major one, it is a masterpiece: seldom will you find a better class of fadeout. Again and again, as if taking a cue from Melchior’s passing, sequences dim to black before we have readied ourselves. It happens as Maria, armed with a microphone, prepares to eulogize the deceased; as she walks away, down a corridor, in her luscious gown; as she Googles Jo-Ann on her iPad; as she stares at the slumbering Valentine; and as they bathe together in a lake, screaming in joy at the cold.
Near the end, in line with Nietzsche’s words, a solemn mystery is sprung upon us and left unsolved, yet that is not the chief surprise of the movie. Who could have guessed that it would be stolen by the young? When Jo-Ann eventually arrives, for instance, she proves to be decorous and demure, with a novelist for a boyfriend, and a gray dress designed by you know who. She also has a wolf pack of paparazzi on her trail, and one of the film’s delights—it is more than a mere in-joke—arises from seeing Kristen Stewart inspecting her own predicament, as it were, from the outside. She and her “Twilight” co-star, Robert Pattinson, have been hounded like Jo-Ann, without pause or mercy, and all three could have been forgiven for quitting the fray. But work, as ever, is the saving grace. Pattinson has turned to David Cronenberg, and Stewart first to Walter Salles (she was good in “On the Road”) and now to Assayas. It is she, rather than Binoche, who lingers in your mind when the film is over, and leaves you musing on what comes next; Valentine, chafing at her job, with her uncool spectacles and her droopy shrugs, somehow holds the greater promise. The hired hand brings us down to earth, while the star is lost in the clouds. ♦
