Clouds of Sils Maria
Where: Cineplex Odeon
When: Sunday. 8, 6:30 p.m.
Rating: 4/5 stars
Any doubts about Kristen Stewart’s true acting potential are extinguished thanks to her surprisingly nuanced and mesmerizng performance in Clouds of Sils Maria. Stewart plays Val, personal assistant and confidante to Maria, an aging, world-renowned French stage and screen actor played to understated perfection by Juliette Binoche in this artfully ambiguous meditation on the challenges of artistic creativity.
The co-stars’ near-homoerotic co-dependency is this psychological character study’s most fascinating draw. It centres on divorce-bound Maria’s anguish over whether to appear in a remake of the play that launched her career two decades earlier.
Director Oliver Assayas cleverly parallels the relationship in the play with the two women’s real-life dynamics while in the Swiss Alps to accept an award on behalf of the late playwright Wilhelm Melchior, Maria’s elderly mentor. The fictional onstage relationship is between the character Maria has been offered — an embittered, suicidal older businesswoman, and the role she’d rather play — the attractive younger lesbian assistant she originated. Chloe Grace Moretz’s dead-on portrayal of Maria’s potential co-star, a troubled Lindsay Lohan-like starlet, is the icing on the cake in this sly, slow-moving mountain of metaphors about art and celebrity culture, complete with inspired comic jabs at the Twilight franchise.
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