In his new film Clouds of Sils Maria, French writer-director Olivier Assayas brilliantly foregrounds the work of his thespians, keeping visual flourish subservient to character and performance. Thus on first glimpse the film can be simply described as an astounding feat of acting as Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart disappear into the film’s leads. But Clouds defies simple explanation and begs for a deeper look. It is deceptive, psychological cinema. What it wears on the sleeve is slowly revealed to cloak a densely layered rumination on aging, acting, and being feminine all while living in an ever-shifting cosmos.
Like atoms, Binoche and Stewart collide and meld on screen, and so Assayas shows that acting is action, that performance can be as elementally cinematic as the moving image itself. The former mixes frail elegance with heady gravitas to bring life to seasoned actress Maria Enders. Serving as the ballast to Maria’s existential drama is her unwavering personal assistant, twenty-something Valentine, a vigorous and revelatory Stewart (whom I’ve loved since Adventureland, for what it’s worth). Shucking every caricature sketched of her since the Twilight series, Stewart is a heavyweight, standing beside Binoche as an equal.
While set mostly amongst the entrancing beauty of Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps, Clouds could also be seen as a cerebral chamber piece, Maria’s clouded mindscape the theater. She sees aging as a form come to haunt her, echoing through her trials with divorce woes and the death of her mentor playwright Wilhelm Melchior. When asked to star in a revival of Wilhelm’s play “Maloja Snake”—which made her a star 20 years earlier—but as the older lead, her existential banshee scream is deafening. She is no longer the young and beautiful, 20-year-old intern Sigrid. She is Helena, a failed business heiress facing midlife. Sigrid was Maria’s muse, but as if mirroring her own life’s trajectory, she must now become the role – the woman – she’s always avoided.
Much of Clouds’ runtime consists of exchanges between Maria and Valentine in Wilhelm’s home where Maria begins to assume the role of Helena. Stuck in an emotional spiral, Valentine remains her steady constant, and as their interactions grow more intensely personal, lines begin to blur. Method acting mimics life, which is underscored by how the camera often opens on a scene of the two engrossed in dialogue, making it hard to tell if these interactions are born of the script they’re rehearsing or of real life.
At times, the film feels like it may go the way of the play itself, which follows a psychosexual tale of seduction and betrayal between two women. The relationship between Maria and Valentine always feels on the collective relational of edge of playfulness, tension, encouragement, darkness. Yet instead of letting this morph into some strange Hitchcockian-DePalma thriller where lust overwhelms into a diabolical climax, Assayas eschews the obvious.
The surface itself even furthers the film’s elusiveness by being boldly explicit. Much of the dialogue underlines the film’s themes. The two leads discuss generational issues like Valentine telling Maria to “Google” someone or explaining to her the self-destructive tendencies of a young starlet documented by many a media outlet. Though these feel on-the-nose, in the deft hands of Ossayas, the surface is only the means by which these character’s complexities are explored.
A deeper, more patient look reveals these very specific conversations to be the fruit of real, lived-in characters. Maria is obsessed with her perception yet is completely out of touch with others’ opinions of her. She is trapped within her mind, wrestling with her image. Others’ perceptions of her are pushed to the recesses of her consciousness. This lack of awareness accentuates her struggle with aging, revealing it as extremely isolating. Even her relationship with Valentine remains half-formed, with the young assistant baffled and frustrated by her lover/mentor/friend. Like a giant blinking eye, the camera often fades to black after an episode between Maria and Valentine, as if Maria’s memory is fading further from these experiences.
Perception in Clouds, as in life, is slippery. It changes with the perceiver, be it in various interpretations of “Maloja Snake,” in the culture’s perception of celebrity, or in Valentine’s positive perception of Maria/Helena. Acting as Assayas’ surrogate, Valentine even explicitly states to Maria that objects are seen differently as perspectives change over time. In boldly telling the audience how to watch this film (or how to observe any work of art for that matter), Assayas uses the very layers of existence as a way to observe humanity and life itself. Aging is exorcism, new perspectives haunting until they replace the old. Art truly does imitate life.
Aging as a process – much like method acting – is a matter of slipping into uncomfortable, ill-fitting skins. Roles come which will challenge who we know and who we desire ourselves to be. Life is a dizzying, incessant rehearsal in attempts to conjure the personas we know we are becoming or to prepare as best we can for those impending. We naturally lust for the old selves while abhorring the new. Clouds of Sils Maria is an invitation to remember that there is power in perception.