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.

Something in the Air (Après Mai).

The English translation for Après Mai (2011) is ‘After May’. The May referred too is the one in 1968 when France erupted into volatile period of civil disquiet that began with student unrest and wildcat strikes followed by street battles with the authorities, a massive general strike involving 11,000,000 workers and the occupation of factories and universities. This action by the people of France lead to a governmental fear of a civil war or even a revolution, President Charles de Gaulle fleeing to the safety of a military base in Western Germany. It brought the entire advanced capitalist economy of France to a dramatic halt. This mini revolution eventually petered out with the violent confrontations evaporating and the workers returning to work. When new elections were held in the following June the Gaullist party emerged stronger than ever!

Director and writer Oliver Assayas latest outing is set near Paris, we have moved on 3 years from the heady days of 1968. But we are still dealing with students and their political activism. The main character is the 16-year-old Gilles (newcomer Clement Metayer) a leftist activist and budding painter with a taste for the Madcap Laughs of Syd Barrett who is prepared to act on his beliefs and take part in various forms of civil disobedience. We meet like-minded teenagers who belong to such collectives as Vive la revolution or the Youth Liberation Front and think they can change the world order. But they come up against not only the elite French bourgeoisie but also various left wing groupings that offer no support to the enthusiastic youngsters, as normal it appears impossible for the Left to be unified. (Something’s never change) Other characters involved in Gilles life and politics are the willowy bohemian Laure who is more of a hippy than a politicalised activist, his ultra serious girlfriend Christine (Bluebeard star Lola Creton) who, after a particularly nasty incident involving a security guard during a violent confrontation, goes travelling with a group of militant filmmakers and best friend Alain who takes up with Leslie an American dance student whom he accompanies  on a journey to Afghanistan.

The excitement of youth.

This adrenaline rush of a movie pays great attention to detail from the vinyl long player to the VW Camper Van via Molotov cocktails and slogan graffiti and does not hold back when demonstrating the brutality of the authorities representatives. How this semi autobiographical works makes you envy the freedoms afforded to youth during this period. In an interview with the director, conducted on behalf of The Guardian newspaper, he states that ‘the films motivation is the dynamics of the collective, likened to an anarchist organism, but at the expense of intimacy’. Which basically means that the ‘cause’ comes before anything else even your own personnel feelings.

 

The end justifies the means?

My only criticism is that the film merely hints at the real struggle: the inequalities of the working class. Where as our middle class academic students don’t really seem to want for anything, they walk the walk and talk the talk, but you can’t help but feel that most of them will end up as the bourgeoisie with well paid careers, a large semi detached, three privately educated children and croissants for breakfast. But all the same a great movie from the man that gave us Carlos the Jackal 2010, a five and a half hour masterpiece originally made for TV and the slow burning emotional study of a French family under stress Summer Hours (2008). 

Carlos the Jackal

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez - Carlos the Jackal

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was named after the Russian Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by his father, a well-known Leninist lawyer, as were his younger brothers Lenin and Vladimir. Born in Caracas, Venezuela in1949 Ilich became much better known as Carlos the Jackal. The exploits of the revolutionary fighter has now been turned into a five and a half hour, 3-part French-German television drama and shown as a feature film in selective cinemas. Directed by French director Oliver Assayas (Irma Vep 1996, Clean 2004, Paris jet’aime 2006, Summers Hours 2008) Carlos (2010) was first shown out of Competition at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

Gabriele Krocher-Tieman 'Nada'

The mini-series follows Carlos from his attempt to assassinate Joseph Sieff the Jewish chairman of Marks and Spencer and vice president of the British Zionist Federation (an organisation that campaigns for a permanent homeland for the Jewish people) in London in 1974 up to his arrest in 1994 and subsequent life imprisonment for the murder in Paris of two French secret agents and an PFLP informant. One of Carlos’s most notorious achievements was the OPEC raid on December 20th 1975 when he led a six-person team and assaulted their leaders meeting in Vienna, and took over sixty hostages killing three people in the process. The other famous member of the group taking part in the OPEC raid was Gabriele Krocher-Tieman ‘Nada’ who was a member of Germanys second generation Red Army Faction. Carlos also launched a bombing campaign to force the French authorities to release his wife, Magdalena Kopp, following her arrest in Paris in 1982.

Magdalena Kopp - Carlos's wife.

After nearly 35 years it’s difficult to get to the truth behind some of these events and fill the gaps that the media left when they reported on only certain aspects and actions giving their own version of events. It was planned to make a movie about Carlos’s arrest in Sudan, but when the director read deeper into our insurgent the original idea grew into something far more ambitious, namely to make the series of films about his broader life rather than concentrating on a small section. Filmed as far as possible in real locations it manages to successfully give an accurate look and feel to the 1970’s and 80’s settings. Assayas typecast the commando’s based on what is known and obviously used dramatic freedom for the rest but attempted to be somewhere near the accepted truth, delving deeply into the psyche of Carlos successfully fleshing out a human face. Like all great soldiers of the revolution Carlos appears to have a somewhat confused ideology and at times baffled the puritanical left wing who suddenly had a champion that was a cross between a gangster and a rock star but intelligent and well educated. Edgar Ramirez is probable one of the very few actors that could give credence to the part having to be both convincing at various ages and being capable of speaking four languages. The film would have been inconceivable without this actor who manages to portray the power of Carlos as well as showing the human side of this fascinating legend. Treat yourselves to a piece of modern history.