Clouds of Sils Maria

Stewart is intriguingly opaque, as if she were resisting the star’s obligation to embrace her audience, to make herself an open book. As such, she’s the perfect partner in mystery for the hardly less opaque Binoche in this cryptic, restlessly circling movie of multiple perspectives—possibly the most intriguing yet from the always unpredictable Assayas.

One of the great pleasures of the movie is how Mr. Assayas plays with and then subverts the ugly dynamic familiar from movies like “All About Eve,” with its vainglorious older woman destined for a fall, done in by vanity and the conniving younger female upstart. The three women in “Clouds of Sils Maria” love, talk and move, move, move, sharing lives, trading roles and performing parts. The lives they lead are messy and indeterminate, but each woman’s life belongs to her.

Olivier Assayas takes what could have been a ready-made life-imitates-art wank and, with the help of two amazing performers, crafts something rich and genuinely mysterious from it.