Valentine (Kristen Stewart) balances herself inside a noisy train car as she holds her phone, she rolls her eyes, sighs and offers monotonous responses to the person on the other end and we understand this is but one of many similar calls she’s had to take. She hangs up and walks into the private train compartment where her employer awaits. Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) is a famous actress who has hired Valentine as her personal assistant, when we first meet them they are going through the lines of a speech Enders will give at a tribute for Wilhelm Melchior the playwright whose Maloja Snake “made her”. Then another phone call and everything changes as Maria learns her mentor has died. In a second, she has come face to face with mortality.
Maria is then offered a chance to star in a revival of Maloja Snake, except this time she won’t be playing the twenty-something lead, but the forty-something antagonist who falls in love with the younger woman, leading to her downfall. Maria prepares for the part by rehearsing with Valentine. If you think you know this is going, you’re absolutely wrong and one of the many pleasures in Olivier Assayas’ haunting Clouds of Sils Maria, lies precisely in rejoicing in the satisfaction of discovering the many faces of artistic interpretation.
While Assayas covers territory explored in such classics as All About Eve, The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant and other actress-centric works, he does make his own contributions to the “subgenre”, especially when it comes to the merciless cycle of tabloid consumption and manipulation. “I thought we despised the internet” Valentine points out when Maria suggests she Googles someone who wronged her, but then we catch her in bed gleefully going through TMZ-like videos of the young actress (a viciously seductive Chloë Grace Moretz) who will play opposite her in Maloja Snake.
The sensuous Binoche who has mastered the ability to be earthy and ethereal bites into the role of Enders with pure delight. She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t indulge in big diva moments - at least not the expected kind - instead, she almost seems to purr her way through the film. Always the generous actress, she allows Assayas to make her seem monstrously callous and insensitive while clad in Chanel and becomes almost childlike during a scene when Valentine takes her to a 3D movie, as we see her taking her glasses on and off, both with wondrous disbelief and disgust at the gimmickry of it all.
Stewart has never been better. She gets rid of the aura of scandal and celebrity that have made her so famous, and effortlessly makes Valentine feel like a person we know. Her shy smile exuding a warmth we would’ve never imagined she possessed. In a film filled with meta references she always lacks the self-consciousness she displayed in the Twilight movies, and as Assayas’ screenplay sends snarky lines her way (“there are werewolves involved in it for some reason” about a movie pitch) she evades them beautifully, making us forget about Kristen so we can only see Valentine. Her soft, sensitive acting makes for an engrossing mano-a-mano when contrasted with the more aggressive Binoche.
Like the breathtaking location where it mostly takes place, which presents the characters with a threat and a playground of sorts, Clouds of Sils Maria casts a strange spell on us. Perhaps Assayas’ most enlightening work to date, a reminder that artistic creation is still the closest we’ve been to touching the divine.
