Clouds of Sils Maria is a 2014 film, written and directed by Olivier Assayas and starring Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart and Chloe Grace Moretz.
This is a very interesting film dealing with several layered themes: aging; acting; “real” life and fiction among them. Binoche plays an aging actress whose career was made playing the younger woman in a play in which, as a personal assistant to an aging actress, she coldly enters into an affair with her and eventually dispossesses her. Now, 20 years later, she agrees to redo the play for the London stage, this time playing the older woman to an up and coming young and calculating actress (Moretz). Stewart plays Binoche’s real life personal assistant. Their relationship and the older-younger woman relationship in the play have some parallels (and many differences) – to the point where when they’re reading lines from the play, it’s at times difficult to know whether the exchanges are from their actual relationship or from the play’s script.
The title refers to a phenomenon at a particular place in the Swiss Alps when at times the clouds roll in along a river bed appearing as a great white snake moving along the river – an actual phenomenon, and hence the name of the play in the film, the Maloja Snake. The setting and photography are stunning.
There are many more relationship complications, and for a film with minimal “action,” the dialogue and technique are riveting.
I didn’t think it a great film, but a fascinating one, and quite worth its two hours.