Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
A veteran actress comes face-to-face with an uncomfortable reflection of herself when she agrees to take part in a revival of the play that launched her career 20 years earlier.
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4 films that influenced Clouds of Sils Maria
What critics say influenced Clouds of Sils Maria
The star effortlessly keeps pace with the filmmaker’s empathetic tricks and his nods to such foreign-language classics as Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura.”
There are certainly purposeful echoes here of hothouse, inside-out, binary inter-female theatrical dramas like Persona and All About Eve.
Here, the closest comparison might be Bergman’s Persona, as Maria, played by Juliette Binoche — the goddess of European cinema, and no stranger to meta-movies (Certified Copy, Mauvais Sang) — has not one, but two doppelgängers: Chloë Grace Moretz as the young, TMZ-attentive star Jo-Ann Ellis, who will play the role Maria made famous at her age.
The women’s personas (why, yes, I am deliberately hinting at Ingmar Bergman’s shape-shifting “Persona”) blur and overlap.
A more apt comparison, confirmed by a second screening, would be Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a psychodrama of identity by a director whom Assayas, an astute student of human behaviour, has acknowledged as an influence.
Another of the festival’s best selections—and the last screened for the press—was Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, a playful and captivating hybrid of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, and quintessentially Assayas-esque meta-mischief.
There are certainly purposeful echoes here of hothouse, inside-out, binary inter-female theatrical dramas like Persona and All About Eve.
For those who like their references more domestic, we get a touch of All About Eve from the impending collaboration between Maria and a hot mess of an actress played by Chloë Grace Moretz.
A variation on the All About Eve theme that hinges primarily on the emotional and psychological effect aging has on a vital, successful actress, Clouds of Sils Maria is an engaging, if rarefied, inside look at the private world of a star.
Updating the 1950 classic "All About Eve," Assayas makes a lot of the movie feel on-message.
The aging actress has always been a deliciously potent subject for movies, from Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard" to Margo Channing in "All About Eve" and way beyond.
Another of the festival’s best selections—and the last screened for the press—was Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, a playful and captivating hybrid of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, and quintessentially Assayas-esque meta-mischief.
Assayas is fully in touch with the open spaces and spiritual ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni; parts of Sils Maria carry echoes of both L’Avventura and Eclipse.
The star effortlessly keeps pace with the filmmaker’s empathetic tricks and his nods to such foreign-language classics as Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura.”
There’s touches of “Persona” and “L’Avventura” here, but they’re there almost as meta-movie jokes, not intended to be solved.
And Assayas’s casting adds layers of meta-textual nostalgia (he co-wrote Binoche’s own breakthrough film as a 20-year-old, Rendez-vous) and mischief as Twilight star Stewart makes earnest defence of fantasy blockbusters, and Jo-Ann’s hounding by the press mirrors Stewart’s own.
That Assayas has chosen to do it with Juliette Binoche as his star represents a return to a creative collaboration the filmmaker and actress began nearly three decades ago in "Rendez-vous."
Juliette Binoche is at the peak of her powers in an autobiographically inflected role created for her by Olivier Assayas, co-writer of Rendez-vous, which helped kick-start her screen career in the mid-80s.
And didn’t Juliette Binoche, who plays Maria, get her breakthrough with Rendez-Vous, written by Assayas?
Assayas had helped catapult Binoche to French film stardom by co-writing the fluid, jolting erotic melodrama Rendez-vous (85), in which she played a hyper-sexualized gamine.
(More meta-ness: Assayas wrote André Téchiné’s 1985 film Rendez-vous, which was one of Binoche’s earliest starring roles.)