Critics reviews

For all the talent and ambition on display, Clouds of Sils Maria is airless and oppressively structural. Assayas has Maria's problem: He's a master craftsman unable to locate the unruly pulse of his art. One senses that every element of each scene has been fastidiously arrived at and achieved, such as the fact that Maria shares her name with the Swiss village of the titular setting.

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.

Clouds of Sils Maria seems to slip, slide, twist, and morph to its ambiguous conclusion. But its nuanced depiction of art making, performance, and power comes into view as clearly as the Maloja Snake—for a few fleeting moments, somewhere in the space between Binoche and Stewart—undeniable and extraordinary to behold.

This is a film about the centrality of the actress. I insist on "actress" just as I insist that it's crucial to the film's meaning that all the directors in it are male, and not a sexist accident... This is a film about the relationship between the female actor and the male writer/director, which tracks the structural inequalities that prevent the character from realizing what the film itself ultimately proves for the actress: that she has the power to create her own meaning.

Olivier Assayas's testy, teasing examination of female identity and celebrity construction layers its cultural and existential debates with the millefeuille complexity of a master; its actresses are visibly thinking as they work, interpreting the script's questions as they pertain to character and self alike. Yet there's something arch and glassy about it anyway.

Binoche plays her role with elegance and melancholic wit – her character slips between fact and fiction in a way that has something in common with her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy – but it's entirely fitting that she's outshone on this occasion by her younger co-star. Stewart won a César – a French Oscar – for her performance here, and it's her best by some distance to date. This is the kind of ravishingly smart, liltingly beautiful film you assume isn't being made any more. It is.

Stewart won the César award for Best Supporting Actress for Clouds of Sils Maria, and while it's tempting to suggest that she deserved the prize just for being able to keep up with Binoche in their long back-and-forth dialogue scenes, the fact is that the American ingénue actually creates the richer characterisation.

Perhaps Assayas, having just passed sixty, has lost some of his interest in unsettlement as a motor for a film. But it would be truer to say that the sort of unsettledness that interests him has evolved into a more deeply internalized, suppressed, or private kind... [Maria,] more than any other character in Clouds of Sils Maria, has the self-determination to control the movie's trajectory, and it is this that helps explain why the movie's long midsection is so riddled with gaps, elisions, and dead zones.

The film resists resolution, and instead allows the characters' different projected personas and ambiguities to coexist. Clouds of Sils Maria is not so much a hall of mirrors, but a prism. We know ourselves always in some way vis-à-vis the other, through the prismatic lens of that relation. We interpret others in part because we cannot ever fully know ourselves.

It isn't merely that the images of the film are generic; they're fungible, interchangeable, created with tasteless indifference, and piled in by the shovelful to show the performers fitting together the pieces of the script on screen.

Binoche and Stewart spend most of the movie in a two-way conversation, and each woman seems to bring out something new in the other. That Stewart can keep up with Binoche is impressive, but that she can think alongside her is exciting. The movie, which Olivier Assayas wrote and directed, is a world of wonders, most of them cerebrally twisty and emotionally hallucinogenic.

Assayas executes a gambit in the final fifth of the movie that makes matters all the more enigmatic. It's almost as if the conflicts the film depicts up until this point—rendered in convincing, epigrammatic dialogue and action, performed with sometimes searing conviction by Binoche and Stewart in particular—have suddenly been deemed too pat by the filmmaker. His way of shaking thing up is…intriguing, for sure. It's one of those moves that make a second viewing worth contemplating.