Assayas: Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)

With the exception of Steven Soderbergh, it’s hard to think of a contemporary director who has sought to make complexity his muse as assiduously as Olivier Assayas. Set in a post-digital world that’s at once overdetermined and improvisational, his films seem to unfold at a different altitude from waking life, which works beautifully with the rarefied alpine backdrops of Clouds of Sils Maria, a rumination on cinema, theatre and digital technology that takes place against the staggering landscapes of southeastern Switzerland. On the face of it, the narrative is something of a Bergman tribute, a chamber drama in which Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), an aging stage and screen actress, retreats to the Swiss Alps with her assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), to start rehearsing her next role. Not only is she now playing the older woman in a lesbian drama she debuted in twenty years ago, but her rehearsals – and relationship – with Valentine quickly become indiscernible from the play itself, especially since there are very few other characters in the film. To some extent, what ensues plays as a metafictional puzzle, a cryptic set of associations that extend far beyond the characters and the play, showcasing Assayas’ tact and allusiveness as a screenwriter more than any of his films to date. At the same time, though, the sense of complexity is too emergent and viral to really feel predetermined in any way either, putting you at the forefront of a narrative cloud that seems to change its shape depending on what it encounters, threading its way through Assayas’ cryptic architecture with a casual, if provisional, grace. For all the change in backdrop, then, there’s the same sense of being perpetually in transit as in Assayas’ earlier techno-thrillers, although it’s considerably quieter and more inward here, as we’re more or less confined to a relationship that also feels emergent at every moment, an agoraphobic chamber drama in which the chamber itself always feels like a work in progress. For perhaps that reason, Assayas’ actual transitions between scenes feel even more disarmingly woven into the fabric of the film than usual – less about maintaining continuity than reiterating a pervasive, mysterious discontinuity, they refuse to ever allow this mercurial relationship to settle or stabilise as we might expect. In fact, as Assayas folds more and more miscellaneous and found footage into his cuts and fades – police reports, an X-Men parody, a series of excerpts from a silent film about cloud formations – it starts to feel as if the whole film is poised at the hinge between scenes, or between screens, as Maria searches for a way to transition into the next part of her life, the next medium where she’s likely to make her mark. Too accumulative for any scene to ever really end, but accumulative enough that you feel as if you’re always approaching the end of each scene  before it’s even begun, it’s frantic and serene all at once, a beautiful and tantalising glimpse of how late Assayas might look, as well as a sequel of sorts to Something In The Air.