Clouds of Sils Maria.

Written and directed by Frenchman Oliver Assayas (Carlos the Jackal 2010, Something in the Air 2011) his latest film has received six Cesar Award nominations including best film, best director, best original screenplay and best cinematography with Kristen Stewart having the distinction of becoming the first American actress to win a Cesar by winning Best Supporting Actress.

The basic story of Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) has been compared to Joseph L Mankiewicz’s 1950 American melodrama All About Eve.  Assayas contemporary version of the story is set mainly in Sils Maria located in a very beautiful part of the Swiss Alps. An ageing actress Maria Enders has been offered a part in a stage play she did twenty years ago by the 'must work for' theatre director Klaus Diesterweg, but this time she is offered the part of the older women, while her original role is to go to an up and coming American actress Jo-Ann Ellis who brings with her a reputation as a fire-brand. Maria, accompanied by her assistant Valentine (Stewart), retreats to Switzerland to practice her lines and get her head around the fact that she is far to old for younger role!

The wonderful Swiss scenery.  

French actress Juliette Binoche, who has now appeared in over 40 feature films gives her usual accomplished performance as the ageing, but still attractive, Marie Enders. Kick-ass (2009) star Chloe Grace Moretz gives the character of Jo-Ann Ellis a Hollywood boost while German star Lars Eldinger (Was bleibt 2012) plays the stage director.

This in fact a very wordy film that come across as a stage play with real scenery, and one must be honest and admit that the scenery is stunning with great shots of the Swiss Alps accompanied by an appropriate classical soundtrack. But even allowing for the accomplished acting from Binoche and Stewart the movie can not hide its one main fault - it does becomes a touch boring with all the talking coupled with its two hour running time! I can't help feeling that Assayas is trying to be a little to clever jumping between the fiction and the fact and back to the fiction played out on the screen. It is for all sakes and purposes a fairly traditional story about coping and maintaining your identity, as you get older. The last thing I would want to do though is put you off seeing this movie, if for no other reason than to see Binoche and Stewart at the pinnacle of their art.

Some woman have natural class.

Was Bleibt (Home for the Weekend)

It’s almost impossible to go into a DVD store in Germany, even in Saturn’s vast stores, and find any thing other than American films dubbed into German. But as luck would have it I found an interesting movie that was made and filmed there and had ‘Englisch untertitels’. Was Bleibt (2012) has only been shown in the UK at the 2012 Cambridge Film Festival under the title Home for the Weekend, although the direct German translation is I believe What Remains which depicts this story of a fractured upper middle class family far better than the American title.

The first person we meet is Marko, who is in his mid-thirties and has had his first book published, he lives in Berlin with his wife and young son Zowie. But it would appear that his marriage is going through a transitional period. He visits the affluent Gitte and Günter for a family weekend taking along their grandchild. Marko’s younger brother Jakob lives not far from his parents. His dentist business and the building of his house have been partly financed by his father. The gathering is to celebrate the sale of Günter’s publishing business, which means that he can look forward to a comfortable retirement with his wife. This planned family get-together begins to unravel when Gitte, who has been mentally unstable since the boys were children, announces that for the first time in a very long time she is coming off her medication and hopes she can now be treated like an ordinary member of the family instead of them tiptoeing around her and treating her with kid gloves. This announcement does not receive the response she expected and sparks unsuspecting repercussions and rocks the thin veneer of family respectability.

 

The Family.

Hans-Christian Schmid has directed a restrained, sensitive and meaningful drama that was a hit on the festival circuit but will probably never have a general release in the UK. This is a real shame and as one critic remarked if it was an American Independent movie with a bankable cast it would have no problem getting seen. This beautifully photographed and polished movie offers some fine acting especially from Lars Eldinger who plays Marko. The only actor in this European drama that you may be familiar with is Corinna Harfouch who plays Gitte Heidtmann. You may remember she played Magda Goebbels who sacrificed her children for the Third Reich in Oliver Hirschbiegels Downfall (2004) the film that depicted the final days of Adolf Hitler. Also she appeared in Atomised (2006) and 2008’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. 

Corinna Harfouch.