The clouds of Sils Maria

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Movie
German title The clouds of Sils Maria
Original title Clouds of Sils Maria
Country of production Germany , France , Switzerland
original language English
Publishing year 2014
length 124 minutes
Age rating FSK 6
Rod
Director Olivier Assayas
script Olivier Assayas
production Charles Gillibert
camera Yorick Le Saux
cut Marion Monnier
occupation

The Clouds of Sils Maria is a 2014 feature film directed and written by Olivier Assayas . The main roles are played by Juliette Binoche , Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz .

The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival . He was also the Midnight Sun Film Festival , Munich Film Festival , Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival invited and was awarded the Louis Delluc Prize and a César Award.

The film was shot in Leipzig , Berlin , South Tyrol and Sils Maria , and the cinema release in Germany was on December 18, 2014.

action

Die Wolken von Sils Maria is about the aging actress Maria Enders, who became famous at a young age through her leading role in the play and film Malojaschlange by director Wilhelm Melchior. The play tells of two women of different ages named Helena and Sigrid, who get entangled in a complicated web of relationships of erotic affection, dependency and self-assertion, which ultimately ends with the elder Helena disappearing. Whether Helena will commit suicide or just disappear is an open question. Enders, who played the part of the younger Sigrid and still identifies strongly with the character twenty years later, is asked by the well-known young director Klaus Diesterweg to take on the role of Helena in a planned revival. For her role as Sigrid at the time, the very young Hollywood starlet Jo-Ann Ellis is planned, who is currently celebrating its premiere with a science fiction film and also seems to attract the attention of the tabloid press and social media again and again. Enders is initially negative about Diesterweg's offer, but ultimately accepts it.

In the mountains of Sils Maria she begins the first text rehearsals with her personal assistant and confidante Valentine, who reads in the part of Sigrid. Enders is increasingly struggling with the supposedly weaker character of Helena and is briefly considering withdrawing from her contract with Diesterweg. However, because her lawyer believes this would be very expensive, she decides to go through with the project and continues the text rehearsals with Valentine in the Swiss mountains. Working on her figure is becoming increasingly difficult for Enders and shows itself as a mirror of her own conflict-ridden confrontation with aging. Valentine, who is about the age of the younger character and tries to bring Enders closer to the digital world of Google, Youtube and social media, sees the figure of Helena in a much more positive light than Enders and offers her alternative interpretations of the role, which Enders does cannot or will not let in. Instead, she Googles Jo-Ann Ellis and seems alienated and attracted to her at the same time.

The close relationship between Enders and Valentine becomes increasingly tense as the text rehearsals for the play. Her confrontation with the complicated relationship between the two female characters becomes entangled with their own relationship with one another, reality and fiction overlap. Finally, Enders and Valentine get into another argument about the interpretation of a scene, this time about the end of the play: While the "Disappearance of Helena in the mountains" is a clear metaphor for her suicide for Enders, Valentine sees it as an open ending can also mean that it starts a new life somewhere else. When the two of them go on a hike the next morning to see the so-called Maloja snake , a rare weather phenomenon after which the play is named, Valentine suddenly disappears and does not return to Enders later.

The last part of the film begins the day before the Maloja snake rehearsals in London. Maria Enders meets with the director Klaus for dinner. But gossip about Jo-Ann Ellis and her married writer friend, whose wife tried to kill herself because of his relationship with Ellis, intervenes and takes Enders' attention. The food bursts and Ellis completely draws the attention, Enders is suddenly just a side note, an observer of Ellis. The later conversation with Klaus in the car also makes this clear, as do the rehearsals and the conversation with Ellis. But Enders has also changed in relation to her new assistant. The relationship is more distant than with Valentine and purely professional. On the day of the premiere, a few minutes before her appearance, Enders receives a young director who wants to win her for a new role. The project deals with the progress of time, which he himself is critical of, as well as the feeling of having been born in the wrong age, combined with the criticism of Ellis and the swinging of stories on the part of the tabloid press. It seems obvious that this has a lot to do with Ender's own questions about life. It is not shown whether Enders accepts or rejects the offer. The focus is on the criticism of the times and the young director's statement that every person carries every time, regardless of their age. In the final scene, Enders goes to the stage to see Helena and gets into position for the opening scene of the play - smoking she awaits Sigrid's appearance.

Maloja snake

Meteorological autumn phenomenon in Maloja: the "Maloja snake"

The title of the play refers to the Maloja wind , which occurs mainly in autumn in Maloja in the Swiss canton of Graubünden . Due to air balancing currents, clouds then move like a snake over the Malojapass and envelop the valley while the sun can shine above it. The weather phenomenon is not as rare as it sounds in the film. Here, in preparation for the play, Enders is watching an old black and white film that describes the phenomenon. This is the documentary film Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja by Arnold Fanck from 1924, which is available in a nine-minute version.

Later in the film, Enders and Valentine set out to watch the Maloja snake themselves. It is the scene in which Valentine disappears without a trace, while Enders sees the “bad weather messenger” in the valley. In the review by Jan Schulz-Ojala in the Tagesspiegel it says: “The snake darkens the valley, it puts age over youth, the present over the past, and sometimes it devours a film character, it doesn't solve anything for you in their own mist. "

reception

The film received mostly positive reactions at its premiere in Cannes. At Rotten Tomatoes , 90% of the reviews are positive, out of a total of 21 reviews. The average rating is 7.6 / 10. At Metacritic , the film received a Metascore of 78/100 with a total of 9 reviews.

The portrayals of Juliette Binoche , Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz as well as the script were particularly popular . Robbie Collin commented on the Telegraph that the film was "complex, enchanting and melancholy". Binoche plays with “elegance and melancholy dignity”, her character glides “between fiction and reality” in a way that is reminiscent of her role in Die Liebesfälscher . In the foreground, however, would be Stewart, who is "probably her best role so far", "sharp and subtle, obvious and suddenly aloof". Peter Debruge wrote in Variety , The Clouds of Sils Maria is a "multi-layered, women-specific, meta-fictional film that takes everyone involved, especially Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz, to new heights."

For film-dienst , the film is “a commentary on digital modernity that is as melancholy as it is ironic”. The relationships between the characters are "just as complex as the complex (film) cultural references". Cinema wrote that the "intensive dialogues between Binoche and Stewart move more and more in an ambivalent area of ​​tension between rehearsed lines of text and real conflicts". Assayas sound out the "gray area between person and role" and thus create a "multi-layered character study against the cool backdrop of the Swiss Engadine".

Gerhard Midding from epd Film summed up that “Assayas' Actresses Film ” creates “filigree connections between the play and the film story”. It is a film “for and about Juliette Binoche”, in which the “nervous participation with which Assayas once filmed the inner turmoil of young people [...] has long since given way to a vibrant elegance”. “His curiosity” is now directed “towards how the passage of time affects his characters”, “how their longings and relationships are eroded”.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for The Clouds of Sils Maria . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , October 2014 (PDF; test number: 147 432 K).
  2. ↑ Top secret filming of «Sils Maria». Southeastern Switzerland, accessed on July 29, 2015 .
  3. ↑ a b review in Tagesspiegel of December 16, 2014, accessed online on January 2, 2015
  4. ^ Clouds of Sils Maria (2015). Rotten Tomatoes . Retrieved January 23, 2015 .
  5. ^ Clouds of Sils Maria. Metacritic , accessed January 23, 2015 .
  6. ^ Clouds of Sils Maria, review: 'bewitching' . Retrieved June 16, 2014: “This is a complex, bewitching and melancholy drama […] Binoche plays the role with elegance and melancholic wit - her character slips between fiction and fact in a way that recalls her role in Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy. But it's Stewart who really shines here. Valentine is probably her best role to date: she's sharp and subtle, knowable and then suddenly distant [...] "
  7. ↑ Cannes Film Review: 'Clouds of Sils Maria' ( English ). Retrieved on June 16, 2014: “ Clouds of Sils Maria marks his (Assayas's) daring rejoinder, a multi-layered, femme-driven meta-fiction that pushes all involved - including next-gen starlets Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz - to new heights. "
  8. ↑ Esther Buss: The clouds of Sils Maria. film-dienst , 26/2014, accessed on January 23, 2015 .
  9. ↑ The clouds of Sils Maria. Cinema , accessed January 23, 2015 .
  10. ↑ The clouds of Sils Maria. epd film , accessed April 27, 2015 .