Star Rating:

Clouds of Sils Maria

Director: Olivier Assayas

Actors: Chloe Grace Moretz

Release Date: Thursday 30th April 2015

Genre(s): Drama

Running time: 124 minutes

It's over-long, repetitive and self-indulgent but Clouds of Sils Maria is saved somewhat by two engaging performances from Binoche and Stewart.

Maria Enders (Binoche) is a forty-something actress whose career-defining role was playing an eighteen-year-old who seduced her older female employer in the famous play Maloja Snake. But now she's been offered the part of the older woman in a revival and she’s reluctant to take it on, feeling that she was so connected with the seductress role she couldn’t possibly inhabit the skin of the other character.

Persuaded by her smooth director to at least read for the part, she and her loyal assistant Valentine (Stewart) go through the lines and Maria begins to realise the script is so nuanced that the lines can be shaped to suit her current, more mature state of mind. However, Hollywood wild child Jo-Ann Ellis (Grace Moretz) is touted to take on the younger role and Maria wonders again if she’s doing the right thing by taking this on.

Feeling like one long conversation broken up by a change in location, Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria needs its leads to be on top form for it to work. While the scenes themselves can generate intensity as Binoche and Stewart get stuck into the layered lines of the script. Lines which indirectly (or, more often than not, very obviously) reflect their current real-life situation and feelings for each other. However, once the scenes are over, the energy doesn't stick. The mood Binoche and Stewart work hard to instil doesn't carry over to the next scene and influence the new goings on. Assayas leaves himself with the uphill task of generating engagement from scratch every time he cuts to another location, making the film very stop-start and having any kind of momentum.

But when the story calls for Stewart to vacate the film, Clouds of Sils Maria loses what magic it might have had. Binoche has nothing to bounce off and while Grace-Moretz fills the gap to some extent by first subverting her reputation and then playing up to it, they don’t recreate the same level of intensity Binoche shared with Stewart.

Occasionally engaging but largely dull.