Well, it took three weeks of movies, but I finally branch out a little with my first French film. Well, I say it's French, it is primarily English-spoken, but I call it French because it received six Cesar Award nominations (the French equivalent of the Academy Awards), including a win for Kristen Stewart for Best Supporting Actress.
The film primarily focuses on Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), an actress made famous years ago by her role as the young Sigrid, in the play Maloja Snake. She is asked now as a middle-aged woman to return to the play as the older Helena, the woman that Sigrid has a romantic entanglement with. Stewart plays Maria's assistant, Valentine.
In addition to Stewart's fantastic performance, every actor brings their A-game in this melancholy mid-life crisis piece. The truly impressive aspect of this film is definitely the performances, the ways in which the actors play as actors off of one another, the ways in which the character dynamics grow and change. The whole experience has a meta-narrative running through it that allows the actors to find their characters easier to relate to and therefore believable. It's very similar in this way to Birdman, both lead characters trying to fight irrelevancy while everyone around them is telling them to stop and let someone younger take over.
Actually, just to run with idea for a moment, it actually has a few more similarities with Birdman. Maria has a relationship with Valentine like Riggan had with his daughter Sam; In both cases, the latter acts as a foil, pointing out the weaknesses of the former's viewpoints, sharing in the few moments where they behave like real people, and embracing social media where the other despises it. There's also some similarity between Birdman's Mike and Sils Maria's Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Moretz); both behave as the new blood still reveling in relevancy, looking down upon their respective main character.
But I digress, the acting and character dynamic in this movie are what I'm here to praise. Binoche and Stewart are incredible here, both so natural in their roles that you can hardly believe they're playing characters, each as awesome as the other in the ways in which they share dialogue. It's layered, with Maria's arc leading her to realisations about who she is as a person, and what that means for the dynamic between Helena and Sigrid in the play, and Valentine struggling to affect the views of Maria, as Maria tries ever so stringently to stick to her views of the characters that she had when she first played Sigrid.
The Verdict: It's a little dour in the way it talks about death, getting older and becoming irrelevant, but Clouds of Sils Maria never ceases to be an effective movie, held up by amazing performances from everyone involved. I recommend people give this one a look, especially those who've had their idea about Stewart's acting ability sullied by the Twilight series. Adult themes and conversations makes this both inappropriate and uninteresting to children.
Rating: 7/10
Published July 13th, 2016
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