| My rating | IMDb | Rotten Tomatoes | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Critics | Audience | Critics | Audience | |
| 8/10 | 78/100 | 6.8/10 | 89% | 67% |
Making a film about a fictitious movie star and how his/her career transformed over time is not new. In fact, you can go back all the way to Sunset Blvd., Singin’ in the Rain, or, more recently, Birdman, to see stories of actors who became obsolete for a series of reasons. Yet all of them are different among themselves and incredibly interesting and Clouds of Sils Maria can now join the list.
Maria Enders (the great Juliette Binoche) is a very famous actress and is offered a part in a revival of a play in which she had acted 20 years ago. This time, however, instead of playing the part of the young intern, she will be the older boss, who falls in love for that intern. She’s a bit reluctant but ends up taking the part and goes to Sils Maria, in the Alps, to study her part along with her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart).
The film is divided into 3 parts and the most interesting one is Part 2, where we see Valentine helping Maria to memorize her lines for the play. The dialogue is so intense and the acting is so good that very often you wonder “are they saying it to each other or are they rehearsing the lines?”. Only when one of them looks at the script do we know the answer to that question. But the relationship between them is as complicated as the one portrait in the play that you can’t help but feel that there’s more reality than fiction in those scenes.
I also really enjoyed the fact that the film cleverly talks about the movies that currently are blockbusters (usually franchises, using young, pretty and problematic actors) while Kristen Stewart is a very different character here. She’s famous for the Twilight movies and her personal life is always on the spotlight, yet in Clouds of Sils Maria she plays an outsider to this world and talks about all the actors’ lives.
If you like character-driven movies, with dense dialogues and a few loose ends, you’ll enjoy this one.
