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.