Sils Maria

This is a seriously clever film, with an almost watertight screenplay that keeps you completely engrossed from start to finish and some mesmerising central performances. It is a bit harder to unlock than more mainstream movies, but it provides a hugely satisfying and intriguing discussion when it comes to the end.

Unlike most Hollywood takes on the state of show business and celebrities in the modern world, which is more often than not pretty depressing (take recent films like Birdman and Maps To The Stars), this European film has a much more elegant atmosphere to it whilst it delves into the world of this ageing actress struggling to keep her cool under a lot of pressure.

The film has some absolutely fascinating insights into the world of show business. It looks at jealousy and media pressure on older actresses, whilst also putting across an ironic, satirical poke at the pretentiousness that so many of us have been guilty of with regards to art. There's a lot of talk in this film about reading into films perhaps more than they need to be, but also how more mainstream movies sometimes don't get the deeper recognition they deserve from elitist viewers because of their reputation, which I found absolutely enthralling to watch unfold.

Also, there are some very clever parallels between the relationship between the two main characters, this actress (Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant (Kristen Stewart), and the characters in the play that they are rehearsing for. It seemed to me that the parallels were pretty deliberate, given that it was almost impossible to tell whether the two were rehearsing or talking to each other for real during the practice scenes, which I thought was a brilliant little touch that really helped to emphasise the confusion and deeper trouble that the characters were facing in the story.

Beyond that, there's so much more to think about in the plot, and I'm sure it requires multiple viewings to fully understand, but it's still a hugely captivating drama first time off anyway, which is absolutely brilliant to see.

Away from the story, the performances here are pretty fantastic too. Juliette Binoche perfectly captures her character's sense of confusion and loss as she goes through this time in her life, whilst also making her a recognisably snooty and diva-ish person that you can understand much clearer. Meanwhile, Kristen Stewart is excellent as the personal assistant, who tries hard to get to her employer, but often ends up feeling frustrated, and makes her character just as interesting, even if she is a side-player in the grand scheme of things.

Another point on the performances is that everyone, not only Binoche and Stewart, deliver their lines so brilliantly. It seems a pretty trivial thing to say, but in this film, I noticed what proper dialogue delivery sounds like so much more than anything else I've seen; every word was so clear and crisp, with fantastic emotion behind it, and that was just wonderfully impressive to witness for me.

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.

We witnessed the kinetic energy of the Oscar-winning Birdman about an aging actor making a comeback on the Broadway stage. Now with the expert and engaging Clouds of Sils Maria we witness a middle-aged actress, Maria (Juliette Binoche), contend with both her 20-year return to the same play but as the older character and the energy of a personal assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), that reminds Maria of time's passage and the changes in her profession.

Writer/director Olivier Assayas delights us with stunning camera work in an early sequence on the train;Hitchcock would love the camera and editing if you remember Strangers on a Train. Assayas also features the Alps with such loving cinematography you'll be booking a trip. Credit Yorick Le Saux for the editing and Marion Monnier for cinematography.

The heart of an excellent drama such as this is its words, the best way to convey the complex emotions each actress must display. Besides Binoche's up-close glamour, Kristin Stewart's sassy, dark beauty is there to remind us that youth rules.

The screenplay offers advice about the changing nature of dynamic dialogue: "The text is like an object. It's gonna change perspective based on where you're standing." (Valentine). In the case of Maria and Valentine, the sometimes screwball-comedy-like repartee reveals layers of perception and emotion heightened by the fact that we are witnessing the deconstruction of the acting experience: Maria holds to classical interpretation while Valentine's thesis is that spontaneity and electricity are the key components.

The plot of Maria's accepting a stage role for a play she acted in 20 years ago as the young lead loosely parallels the scenario of this film (young assistant provoking the older actress) until a climactic moment on the mountain, a moment whose ambiguity will demand you complete the scene for yourself. Regardless, you will know you have seen one of the best films of the year depicting the rigorous working of the art of acting given by two of the best actresses today in film (Stewart won a Cesar for this role, Binoche won an Oscar for English Patient, and a mature Chloe Grace Moretz is sure to be Oscar nominated soon!).

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.

The enigmatic title refers to both a climatic phenomenon called the "Maloja snake", which occurs in the Engadinean alpine pass in Switzerland, and to a village at one end of a local lake. The village is the home of an elderly playwright who much earlier wrote a work called "The Maloja Snake" about the complicated relationship between a young woman in her late teens (Sigrid) and her middle-aged female employer (Helena). The film is all about the re staging of this play in which actress Maria who originally took the younger role to great acclaim has now been invited to portray the older woman in the new interpretation.

It is unusual, but a pleasing change, for a film to have all its leading roles taken by women. Superb French actress Juliette Binoche, whom I have admired since her early English-language work ("Damage" and "The English Patient"), is Maria, struggling to come to terms with her different role in the play. American actress Kristen Stewart is excellent in the secondary role as Maria's personal assistant Valentine and so different from her "Twilight" movies. The third role is taken by another young American, Chloë Grace Moretz, who is the actress taking over as Sigrid in the play - again a very different persona from the one we have seen before in the "Kick-Ass" movies.

This is a wordy work but the words matter. At times, we are not sure if the interaction between the two main personages is between Helena and Sigrid or between Maria and Valentine and even between Binoche and Stewart. In truth, there are elements of all three which is how subtle and nuanced is this German-French-Swiss co-production written and directed by the French Olivier Assayas. Ultimately this is a film, like near contemporary "Birdman", about acting but, however much the American Academy may have feted "Birdman", I found "Clouds Of Sils Maria" much more intelligible and engaging.