mirkobozic Juliette Binoche couples up for the very first time with Kristen Stewart in a movie about the famous actress Maria Enders (Binoche) preparing for a re-staging of the piece that made her famous, only this time in the role of the older of the two heroines. She has a very hard time coming to terms that she's past her prime and can't play certain roles any more. Together with her assistant Valentine (Stewart) she travels to the Swiss mountain hideaway of her late mentor to study the text and go through the scenes again. This becomes a painful journey into self-reflection forcing her to face her inner demons, which is aided by Valentine's confrontations with her. In certain moments, we're left to wonder if the things are saying are from the Maria's script or the characters themselves, which turns the film into a multi-layered experience dense with dialogues that carry all the drama. The contrast between the glamorous public life and the delicate, quite intimacy of Maria's private life is a take on how it really feels to be famous nowadays, or what happens when you go back home, and take off the dress and the jewels. Binoche has the ability of inhabiting all her roles with some sort of delicate melancholia that occasionally falls over the threshold of suppressed lust. This is evident here too, as we're left wondering if there's any sexual tension between her and Stewart. I didn't expect much from her but here she proved a worthy sparing partner to Binoche. Chloe Grace Moretz shines as well in the small role of Maria's co-star, the troubled and chaotic teenage diva. This little gem of a movie shares some similarities with Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder's 1950 masterpiece with Gloria Swanson as the deluded silent film diva Norma Desmond who lives in a dream world where, enabled by her butler, she still believes to be a star. Both films address the subject of psychology and pressures of fame, which always comes at a price and consequences some people don't handle very well. In particular, it's about accepting frustrating changes without the luxury of doing it out of the limelight.

cyberalpine Ambiguity is the key world of this film. You are the major actor in the sense that your interpretation makes the film. Each scene is so ambiguous that you can always interpret it in various manners so in the end _you_ are the director. When Maria and Val work on the text, rehearse the play, the feelings are so mingled that you are the one who decide if they are those of Helena- Sigrid or rather Maria-Val. Reality is entangled. I loved the Alps hiking shots and overall the mysterious Maloja snake. I would have rated it a 9 to the Writer-Director Olivier Assayas but reduced it to a 8 because I was disappointed in Juliette Binoche's performance. She is usually better than in this film, it is as if she didn't feel like acting this character, a bit like what happens in the film itself. At several occasions her laugh is artificial and fake. She is obviously ill at ease in this character, which proves what I wrote before about entangled reality between the film itself and the play prepared in the film. I'm not sure I am very clear but those who have seen and felt/perceived the movie as I, will understand.

Love_Life_Laughter When we first meet Maria Enders, played by Juliet Binoche, she is draped in furs and surrounded by the other accoutrements of success and fame as a respected actress, including Val, a subservient and admiring administrative assistant. As we watch, she is stripped of her trappings of success and power, step by step. As we meet her, she is divorcing her husband and is losing her apartment in Paris. Somehow, in a complex ensnarement involving Val, another young new, ruthless ingenue and just as self-involved director, Maria ends up as an afterthought, dismissed after the 3rd act, in a play that years before had established her fame. Maria is so far gone, by the end of the film, that when a true admirer approaches her, she recommends the new ingenue who replaced her in her old role for the part- Maria now sees herself as "too old." In the film's touching denouement, her admirer rejects the "tabloid fame seeking" ingenue. He sees Maria, for whom he wrote the new film part, as "beyond time." Thus, Maria's art survives her so-called compromised aging beauty, and she is validated at the most basic level as the artist she is. Binoche plays Maria with a look of angry confusion, almost childish petulance, at her unexpected, seemingly uncontrollable fall from grace. Underlying this seeming helplessness, however, you can see in her an honesty, a vulnerability, and a focus on acting as an act of integrity that makes her stand out among the other characters, whose motives may not be transparent, but are clearly not based in any higher ideals related to art or in being in the service of art. It is easy to understand why Maria is (or was) such a huge star, and also, how in her relatively innocent focus on the value of art for it's own sake, she could fall into the trap of losing her own sense of her own value by the manipulative, ego-driven, social-media twisting characters around her. Val, played by Kristen Stewart, ensnares Maria like a spider playing with a fly. Their chemistry is palpable. Stewart won the equivalent of the French Oscar for this film, and it is well-deserved. This film, with all of the subtle nuances, is not for everyone. I love the rare films, like this one, that treat the audience as thinking adults, capable of understanding multi-faceted, complex relationships and character.

jocmet-15963 I watched this movie in a cinema in Paris - more or less by chance because I only went there to see the cinema - not the movie. The cinema is a Japanese pagoda. It used to be the Japanese ambassador and his wife's residence. There is a nice zen garden in front and impressive wall paintings with Japanese war battle scenes.When the film was half over it became interesting, because Juliette Binoche (> 50) and her assistant Kristen Stewart (< 30) are stripping in a lake. Binoche gets completely naked but Stewart unfortunately does not. She keeps her bra on. For the rest of the movie I was upset that it had not been the other way round.But one could have known this before, because Juliette gets naked in almost every movie she makes and Kristen Stewart is American.Then the assistant leaves because she finds Switzerland "too provincial", which makes the whole story a bit implausible because she was herself too provincial to take her clothes off before.Then the actress (Binoche) feels frustrated because she is old.In the end the "clouds of Maria Sils" move through the valley.I was nevertheless lucky because I was sitting in this fancy Japanese cinema to watch the wall paintings all the time. If ever you come to Paris, do go there an buy a ticket - whatever the movie is...