Butler's Cinema Scene

Kristen Stewart, Juliette Binoche

“CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA” My rating: B 

124 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Juliette Binoche is just about perfect in “The Clouds of Sils Maria,” playing a middle-aged actress wrestling with issues of aging and art. Of course we expect excellence from Binoche.

What we don’t expect is that Kristen Stewart, the sullen star of the “Twilight” blockbusters,  would more than hold her own with the veteran French actress in an extended battle of one-on-one acting. (If you’ve seen Stewart’s work in indie efforts like “The Cake Eaters,” “Adventureland,” “On the Road”  or “Stil Alice” you know she’s got chops never put to use in her over-inflated vampire saga.)

Stewart — who won a French Cesar Award for her performance — plays Val, the personal assistant to Binoche’s Maria, and from the film’s first frame she is an organizational dervish, simultaneously fielding calls on two cellphones, scheduling appointments and running interference for her famous employer.

Val is more than just a competent social secretary. She is Maria’s confidant, booster, career consultant and, on some level, friend. When Maria has trouble making up her mind or second-guesses her choices — all too common occurrences — Val knows just what buttons to push, what issues to raise to nudge the older woman to a decision.

Writer/director Oliver Assayas’ film centers on a new stage production of the play that made Maria a star at age 18. Back then she was cast as the young office worker who seduces and gradually destroys her boss, a woman 25 years older.

Now, though, Maria will play the older woman. Her cruel young lover is to be portrayed by Jo-Ann (Chloe Grace Moretz), a charismatic young star whose talent is frequently eclipsed by her Lohan-esque bad-girl behavior.

The bulk of the film unfolds in a house on a mountainside in the small Swiss enclave of Sils Maria, where  the low-lying clouds are bizarre and beautiful.

Maria and Val have taken up residence there to prepare for the production. They spend much time running lines from the play — Val reads the younger woman’s role — and dissecting Maria’s conflicted feelings about having to renegotiate the drama from the perspective of a mature but insecure woman.

Making these passages particularly evocative is the way Assayas and his actresses blend the scripted lines with the characters’ off-the-cuff comments. We cannot always be sure where the play ends and the women’s real lives kick in.

There are also hints that Maria and Val’s real-life roles are mimicking those of the characters in the play.

“Clouds of Sils Maria” is not a tidy story. It’s much more about suggestion than overt statement, and its intellectual elements easily trump the emotional possibilities.

In addition, Assayas jams in way more ideas than can be comfortably explored.

There are debates about Hollywood blockbusters vs. little “art” movies (illustrated nicely by a hilariously bad clip from Jo-Ann’s recent sci-fi movie). Maria embraces stories of substance while the more egalitarian Val happily gloms onto star turns and spectacle.

Among the subplots introduced and then abandoned are the suicide of the playwright who gave Maria her first big break, an encounter with Maria’s former lover/leading man (Hanns Zischler), and an attempted suicide by the jilted wife of Jo-Ann’s new squeeze (Johnny Flynn).

And then there’s the revelation that the party-hearty Jo-Ann is a far cannier careerist than her lurid Internet reputation would suggest. (A tip of the hat to “All About Eve.”)

To say that this film is open-ended is a huge understatement. Those who demand neat resolutions will be thoroughly irritated by the loose strings Assayas leaves flapping.

But the film treats its women with respect and insight, and the relationship of Binoche and Stewart’s onscreen characters has a depth and nuance almost never seen in mainstream cinema.

| ROBERT W. BUTLER