I still prefer it to incredibly loud two-hour toy commercials, but I find the experience of watching pretentious would-be prestige dramas like Clouds of Sils Maria nearly as much of an endurance test.
Here is a film that isn’t as smart as it would like us to think. Banal inscrutability gets substituted for profundity. The main characters — aging actress Maria (Juliette Binoche) and her personal assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) — spend their days in a privileged world of luxury hotels, glamorous parties, and alpine chateaus, talking mostly about theater, film, visual art, and critiques of Internet culture. All of this lends a patina of sophistication meant to mask the painful boredom of listening to these women drone on repetitively about such insightful topics as “geez, realizing you’re getting older kinda sucks.”
Decades before, Maria had starred as the conniving young seductress Sigrid in the film adaptation of a work by an acclaimed Swiss playwright. Now she’s been asked to appear in a London stage revival, only this time playing the older woman who’s undone by Sigrid. It’s a character that she’d pitied and was disgusted by when she was 18, so tackling the part obviously forces her to consider how she has changed in the intervening years. At first she rejects the opportunity but comes around to the idea — strangely drawn to working with the Lindsay Lohan-esque tabloid Hollywood starlet (Chloë Grace Moretz) who’s been cast as the new Sigrid.
As Maria runs lines with Valentine, there are echoes of their own relationship within bits of the play’s dialogue. If writer-director Olivier Assayas had just pursued those suggestions — creating something along the lines of another (far superior) film featuring Binoche, Certified Copy, in which it was difficult to know what was real and what was the characters playacting — he might have hit upon a satisfyingly subtle drama.
Instead we get unrealistic nonsense in which every person seemingly gives voice to whatever thoughts cross their minds. I guess the thinking is why bother with subtext when you can put it right there in the text? Then throw in lots of images of clouds set to classical music standards, you know, to emphasize that this is a work of art.
