Head in the CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Clouds of Sils Maria, the latest from French writer-director Olivier Assayas, is a beautifully textured film of austere natural beauty and complicated interpersonal relationships. Assayas films, even the bad ones, are closely attuned to the effect physical spaces have on character’s interior lives. It’s never more literal than the contested estate in Summer Hours, a space laden with memories for a family in mourning. But there are also the anonymous techie nightmare locales in Demonlover, analogue procedurals in Carlos, vintage French cinema echoes in Irma Vep, semi-autobiographical activist circles in Something in the Air, and more. His characters don’t merely play out their stories. They inhabit a space, creating a richly textured stage for their dramas.

His new film takes place in Sils Maria, a small town in the Alps where, from the right scenic view, you can see the clouds sit majestically below the surrounding peaks. They come rolling in over the landscape, with the snowy mountaintops above, a green valley below. A shift in perspective can change an overcast day to one where the clouds snake low elegantly across the horizon. The story that takes place there carries inescapable comparison to Ingmar Bergman, spending the majority of its time with two women at a small house in the Swiss countryside, dealing with their personas and how they confront the existential questions of their lives. The wide-open spaces contrast with the cramped quarters as the women find themselves stuck together while heavy ideas threaten to weigh them down.

But where Bergman finds spiritual concerns at the center of being, Assayas here deals with art. They’re not debating the existence of God. They’re wrestling with textual analysis, competing interpretations of a script that just might define their relationship, their careers, maybe even their lives. This a gripping psychological dynamic wrapped around an invigorating academic exercise. The women are a middle-aged actress (Juliette Binoche) and her younger assistant (Kristen Stewart), who are staying in the isolated town while prepping for a new project. It’s a play about an aging businesswoman and her relationship with her young assistant. The actress made her debut in this play two decades earlier, in the role of the assistant. Now the playwright has died and she agrees to be in a new staging, taking on the other role.

The connection between past and present, life and art, is made clear, then underlined. It’s a moment of professional crisis for the actress, as Binoche subtly lets showbiz fears and artistic frustration mingle with a determination to do right by the play that gave her a start. She has memories of how old the other actress appeared to her back then, and now can hardly believe that she’s that age herself. It certainly doesn’t help her state to be staying in the house of the dead man, running lines with her assistant, who Stewart plays with a congenial disaffectedness sliding into unexpected passions. Their employer/assistant relationship drifts closer to a friendship, mirroring the similar dynamic in the play, which there ended in tragedy. Assayas will often start scenes without cluing us into whether or not we’re hearing lines or what these characters actually are. In this way, the play blends with life, as a fluid exploration of what life brings to art and vice versa.

Lightheaded in the altitude, they engage in long discussions of the play, about the text as an object, while the clouds roll through a pale blue sky. There’s a sense that they’re helping each other look into the haze and pull out an interpretation. The older woman can’t stop worrying that her character is thinly drawn and pathetic. The younger woman sees the same character as containing hidden depths. They’re both right, and wrong. There’s a terrifically unsettling sequence with footage of a winding road playing over images of Stewart, a woozy abstract symbol of the film’s hazy doublings. Because the play isn’t real in our world, and because we only glimpse it through their dialogues, these scenes play out like going to a great class without having done the reading. It’s fascinating, and also easy to get a little lost.

But this only adds to the mystery and gravity of this drama, in which every character is a reflection of the actress’s past – an old co-star (Hanns Zischler), the playwrights’ widow (Angela Winkler) – or a future she can’t quite imagine herself fitting in. We meet a wild young Hollywood actress (Chloe Grace Moretz), introduced through glimpses in YouTube videos and a scene from her franchise picture, then in scenes of icy recognition of the way the world restricts starlets’ choices. There’s an undertow of Hollywood commentary, reflected even in the careers of the three actresses. But in a film Yorick Le Saux shoots with cool calm, filled with palatial landscapes – rolling mountainsides, lush green hills, still waters – and lush classical music, Assayas locates a meditative edge to what could’ve easily been All About Eve or Birdman territory. This isn’t a movie about a desperate artist trying to prove her relevance, or fending off hungrier youth. It’s merely one trembling emotional current running beneath its iced-over surfaces.

There’s an absorbing charge to the leads’ relationship, an interdependence and emotional vulnerability as their isolation forces them to confront core questions about how they see the world and where they’re headed in life. In the process, Binoche and Stewart deliver a wonderful acting duet, playing off each other in ways that break down intermingling professional and personal angst with the feeling of a complicated, lived-in, in some ways unknowable, relationship. It’s a film about fighting insecurities and how unmerciful the world can be in leaving behind those who succumb to theirs. And yet together they make it a warm, sometimes funny, often casually incisive character study about two people who fear they’ve lost sight of who they want to be, and lean on each other while trying to move in the right direction, or at least change their perspective to see something wonderful.

King of the Monsters: GODZILLA

There’s a difference between filling a movie with effects and setpieces and constructing a movie with effects and setpieces. Gareth Edwards illustrates that difference with great excitement and skill in Godzilla, the latest attempt to recreate the beloved 60-year-old Japanese franchise on American shores. Edwards succeeds where others failed precisely because he takes great care in constructing his imagery – steady, dynamic, clear – and pacing – slow and steady, building to an impressive crescendo – to create a vivid sensation of awe. His Godzilla is awesome in the most literal sense of the word, an overpowering feeling of astonishment and terror. He manipulates his film and his audience with a methodical Spielbergian brio, gazing up at his tense scenarios and massive spectacle with trembling fear and wonder.

Edwards’ shoestring 2010 indie Monsters was a meandering mumbly relationship drama set against the backdrop of enormous beings wreaking havoc off-screen, but with it he proved his facility with effects. It ended with a scene of alien monsters so tenderly photographed as to border on the sublime. Now with a massive budget and a requirement to amp up the action, he finds a similar core of respect for the biology and ecology of Godzilla. He’s presented as an animal like any other where it counts, part of the natural order of things. We should fear him and respect him.

The beast’s 1954 debut created him out of the atomic anxieties of post-World War II Japan. This new iteration places him firmly in modern environmental worries. It begins with two scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) surveying a dig in the Philippines that has uncovered incomprehensibly large fossils, and evidence a creature has dug its way out into the ocean. Meanwhile, distant tremors collapse a Japanese nuclear power plant where two more scientists (Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche) struggle to contain the radiation. In an echo of our modern climate change and superstorm anxieties, there’s a clear sense that humans are about to learn we don’t control nature. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

We jump ahead 15 years. Scientists continue to study the strange readings around the disaster area of the film’s opening. Cranston and his now-grown Navy officer son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) explore the area and get caught up in the proceedings when an enormous beast breaks free, revealing itself to the world. In a nod to the franchise’s past, we learn that the military’s Cold-War-era nuclear tests in the Pacific were actually an attempt to put down the ancient beast they called Godzilla. They succeeded only in putting him in hibernation. Now he’s awake, hungry, and on the hunt for sustenance. It’s only a matter of time before he makes landfall in a few cities. The army, led by a tough general (David Strathairn), is in desperate pursuit, frantically cobbling together a plan to save the planet.

If you think all that sounds like it could be the generic plot description of many a monster movie, you’d be right. But where this new Godzilla really makes an impact is in its sensitivity in framing the disasters – the slam-bang monster battles, the peek-a-boo creature stalking, the crumbling buildings, rounds of ammunition, and billowing fireballs – against the consuming terror such a calamity would be to the people on the ground. It’s a monster movie stocked with flat characters run through a diversity of sequences of action and destruction as the low camera looks up at the creatures towering above causing their devastation. But because the people remain framed in the foreground, creating a sense of scale while stumbling away from unimaginable horror, gazing upwards in windswept confusion and terror, it matters.

So what if Taylor-Johnson, our lead, has an incredibly simple emotional through-line of needing to fight his way back to his health-care professional wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and adorable moppet (Carson Bolde) who are stranded in harm’s way? There’s no harm in such shameless emotional manipulation if it isn’t careless. This is also a movie that repeatedly puts barking dogs, small children, and the sick and elderly squarely in the path of chaos. But the movie seems to care about their plights, regards the destruction with a measure of real sorrow instead of mere CGI kick, and treats the events with the right mix of gravity and entertainment. It comes off less a series of jolts, more as a grand, relentless amusement park ride.

The movie is filled with complicated effects shots, pa-rum-pum-pum-pum booming brass on the score, and rattling sound design with deep bass footsteps that start as soft quakes until suddenly something is right on top of us. But it doesn’t add up to only a chaotic jumble of sensations. It’s a movie focused on process, troop movements, and monster behavior. Edwards, with screenwriter Max Borenstein, has shaped setpieces within this narrative to have peaks and valleys, tense escalations, teasing suspense, and dips of shaky, tenuous comfort. Take, for example, a great sequence set at an airport. The power goes out. There are explosions and commotion in the distance. The power comes back on, illuminating a monster towering over the runway. It’s a great tease, and Edwards takes amused pleasure in the construction of it while never losing sight of the scare. Like Spielberg’s Jaws or Jurassic Park or Ridley Scott’s Alien, Edwards knows how to get just as much entertainment out of not showing the monsters as revealing them to us in their entire enormity. No need to get the whole thing in the frame right away when one massive scaly flank striding past as people quake in their skyscrapers is even scarier. Even better, we aren't tired of the monster by the time the climax arrives.

This Godzilla is a full movie: big imagery telling a complete story. It’s not up to much beyond the sensations of its awesome creature feature spectacle. The stock characters remain flat. The ecological message doesn’t resonate or build as impactfully as it could. But it’s operating near the genre’s highest level. Edwards is working with impressive craftsmanship, visual intelligence, and moral weight that too few spectacle-wranglers can manage. Like the best popcorn entertainments of Spielberg, James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, and Peter Jackson, he builds wonder with great patience, excitement, and skill. 

Reflections: CERTIFIED COPY

Abbas Kiarostami, an acclaimed Iranian filmmaker who has made his first film in Europe with Certified Copy, has made a film so deceptively straightforward that by the time you realize you’ve been led into an intellectual hall of mirrors, it’s easy to take it in stride. Two characters drive through the Italian countryside. We think we know them. We meet them. We’re drawn into their lives as they while away the gorgeous afternoon hours together. We spend time with them. But, wait a minute. Who are they? What clues from how they interact can add up into a larger assumption? What’s ultimately puzzling about the movie is what’s so thrilling about it. It artfully deconstructs the very nature of fictional filmmaking. What is it that makes actors performing a scenario, if convincing enough, relatable on a human level? On occasion, it’s even easier to relate, to sympathize, to feel for what is ultimately nothing more than a facsimile, an approximation, a copy of human existence. Certified Copy has the simple formal audacity to ask this question through the story of two people who are implicitly giving themselves the exact same queries. Or are they? Ah, that’s the trick.

It all starts at a reading a professor (William Shimell) gives on his new book. His academic work is an inquiry into the value of reproductions, copies of artwork. If the copy can provoke the same emotional or intellectual response as the authentic original, is the reproduction not itself some kind of art? A woman (Juliette Binoche) and a young boy (Adrian Moore) move towards the front of the room. We cut away from the scholar behind his lectern and watch as they try to settle in. She takes a seat in the front row. The boy is restless, trying to get her attention. What does the man, droning on unseen, do in reaction to this potential distraction unfolding right in front of him? Kiarostami doesn’t cut back. He withholds information about the relationships between actions in the room. The woman and the boy silently communicate while the words that the man is speaking fill the soundtrack. Two mundane moments joined in one fictional scene, and yet the context of the opening scene of a movie by a major filmmaker elevates it to a level of curiosity and inquiry. It’s a copy of real life that achieves a power different from than the original.

Later that day the woman and the man meet and go for a drive. They’re just meeting. At least I thought they were, at first. After all, the film has just begun. The audience has just met the characters. There is no exposition that would lead us to believe they know each other. But as their afternoon goes on, their intellectual conversation grows personal. A waitress mistakes them for husband and wife. But is it a mistake? The woman goes along with it. Conversations circle around, in three languages, effortlessly no less, devouring themselves, covering the same ground or moving on. Discrepancies appear, or do they? The man and the woman test and provoke one another, question, ramble, and flirt. Dialogue becomes monologue and back again. They could very well be a couple, married or lovers, or perhaps they had a relationship that has gone cold, or ended. They could be trying out personas to spice things up or rekindle lost feelings. They could just as easily be strangers playacting a relationship, feeling the waters, testing the limits of the value of a copy, living his thesis.

I have seen the film several times and just when I think I’m close to pinning down an interpretation the film slips away. And yet rather than leave me frustrated, it leaves me invigorated. I want to dive back into the film and spend time with these characters once more, to find the explanation that works best for me this time, an explanation that will undoubtedly be as satisfying and as filled with nagging threads of doubt as each time before. (The strangest interpretation I’ve read proposed time travel to explain away the narrative and thematic wrinkles. I don’t buy it. And yet I can’t deny that I won’t bring myself to discard it entirely either.)

There’s a moment when the man and the woman stop off at a church and we see a bride preparing herself to appear for the cameras and spectators as if she feels the emotion of the moment. But what does she really feel? What is the emotion of the moment for her? Because we see her prepare, we’re let in on the secret. Surely there must be such an answer for this man and woman, too. Is showing an emotion the same as revealing it? Does it even matter when it provokes the same response to an observer, to a camera, to an audience? In the case of this couple, they’re playing to an audience of one, each other. This is a film of reflections, windows and mirrors prominently placed in the frame, endlessly doubling the details or allowing for deep introspection.

That the central relationship of the film remains an utter enigma throughout does not rob the film of emotional power. On the contrary, it opens up rich avenues of exploration. To call it a simple puzzle or a gimmick would be simply unfair. This is a film that could easily be viewed as simply waves of confident befuddlement, just as easily as some could reject it outright as too simple or obtuse. But Binoche and Shimell imbue their characters with such rich humanity and complicated, powerful interior lives and Kiarostami films them with such patience and care that I find it impossible to resist. It’s a film of intellectual and emotional envelopment, a pleasure of the highest order. Who are these people, these cinematic copies of the real thing, and why does filmmaking have the power to make me care so deeply so quickly, even knowing that I’ll never truly know them? They remain fixed there on the screen; they won’t change, only my reactions to them will. With a wondrously delicate dance of the emotional and intellectual, Kiarostami makes art out of artifice even as he asks if that’s even possible. In different moments of the film, the man and the woman each spend time staring into a mirror, but the camera stands in its place so that they are essentially looking into the audience to see what is reflected there.