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The Criterion Channel Presents: Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)


Clouds of Sils Maria is a movie that simply gnaws at you. Its’ layered metatextual devices keep provoking new ideas and interpretation however you try and wrap your head around it. What is it really saying? What does it mean? Who are its’ characters, really? And yet it doesn’t aim to deliberately obfuscate the way movies its indebted to, such as Persona or more obviously The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant do. It definitely wants some clarity in what it is saying.
Olivier Assayas’ 2014 film also owes a lot to the likes of All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard as it depicts a world-renowned French actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) returning to the play that launched her career. It is about the erotically charged relationship between a young and an older woman and how the former exploits the latter until she commits suicide. Maria had formerly played the girl Sigrid, and now in light of the playwrights’ death, has been talked into playing the elder Helena opposite a troubled Hollywood starlet (Chloë Grace Moretz). Most of the film takes place in Sils Maria, Switzerland, the home of the late playwright, where Maria reads lines and tries to overcome her apprehensions and anxieties with her loyal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) on daily hikes, through which process real life and the play become merged, the viewer not entirely sure when Maria and Valentines’ conversations, arguments, or emotional reckonings are genuine and when they are mere rehearsal. Certainly the sexual tension between Maria and Valentine is real, Binoche and Stewart have excellent chemistry and are delivering a couple of the finest performances of either of their careers (Stewart especially is astonishingly good -this might have been where her career renaissance began). Moretz, though she isn’t in the film as much, is wonderful as the living embodiment of everything Maria resents about Hollywood, up to and including the overwrought superhero franchises both were involved in.
The film is an utterly engaging character study as Maria unwittingly performs self-psychoanalysis in her interpretations of Sigrid and Helena, which often clash with Valentines’ in a rift of perception that is simultaneously generational, interpersonal, and theoretical and which spills over into other things such as their views on art and acting -Valentine having a weird admiration for Moretz’s Jo-Ann Ellis in spite of her many controversies that Maria cannot share. And as close as they are, as much as Maria relies upon and believes she needs Valentine, it is a significant chasm of their relationship that ultimately results in a subtle narrative twist which much like the mystery at the centre of Picnic at Hanging Rock, you just can’t take your mind off of.
The title refers to a unique cloud formation in the Maloja Pass of the mountains around Sils Maria that gives the play-within-the-film (“Maloja Snake”) its’ title, and which is witnessed in the climax. Assayas utterly adores this region and captures its wonder stupendously, while allowing it to naturally influence the films’ hauntingly charismatic mood, as much an entrancing and complex a character as the woman who shares its’ name.

Criterion Recommendation: Two for the Road (1967)
Audrey Hepburn only has one movie in the Criterion Collection and that definitely needs to change! My nomination is for Two for the Road, one of the most unique films she was ever a part of that came right near the end of her mainstream career. In it, she and Albert Finney play a couple examining their relationship across a number of years through four holidays to the south of France. A film that is both presented in a non-linear structure and with a refreshing honesty and naturalism in its decade-spanning romance that predicts Richard Linklaters’ Before trilogy, it was unconventional and ahead of time. Directed by Stanley Donen of all people, boasting a Henry Mancini track he considered even better than “Moon River”, and with a sharp tone that hovered graciously between comedy and drama, it deserves greater recognition among the early New Hollywood classics.

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