The Metatextual Exorcist's Assistant: MAPS TO THE STARS, CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Film as a medium isn't old enough that it has a set response as to how to handle the 'problem' of aging A-list actresses. But two 2014 films both recently released on DVD have shown the 'old' way can be made 'new' again through post-modern tweaks. The sexy young bitches of the 80s-90s have found work playing middle-aged actresses fighting to stay young and relevant, the way hot bitches of the 20s-40s did in the 50s-70s, by playing faded stars who go insane from being cooped up in their cobwebbed minds and mansions while the pictures (and cars) get small. Going 'Norma Desmond' allows for a kind of ageist exorcism which then makes the actress playing the actress seem balanced by contrast. So Billy Wilder makes Gloria Swanson seem cool and Robert Aldrich makes Bette Davis seem fearless. Skulking around their eerie mansions, eerie theremins granting their every mirror-ward hiss Grand-Guignol foreboding, the aging actress playing the aging actress is freed from her own Gerascophobe (by Chanel)-scented strait-jacket (starring Joan Crawford).
Olivier Assayas is to the post-modern lesbian corporate thriller what Jean Pierre-Melville was the French New Wave in the early 60s, a vanguard figurehead whose ability to bring post-modern ambiguity to urban thriller cool opened the door between art and genre for anyone with a Gauloises and a DP to slink through. Scenes of Asia Argento walking through a vast bustling Hong Kong mall-flea market--each booth/stall a vast tapestry of electronics, contrasting languages and music all whirling together one after the other--in Boarding Gate is perhaps the most ear-boggling use of post-modern affect in all cinema, but then... what? Then nothing.

Though there's no lady corporate assassins in Clouds of Sils Maria, but it covers similar existential bases, with a trio of strong female leads ranging along the All about Eve axis, playing versions of themselves and each other as they play characters studying to be themselves and each other with the same weird mix of back-stabbing and compassion with which younger executive assistants are shepherded by an older employers into the abyss. It could use some post-affect modernism but instead there's bourgeois European swank, highbrow events, "seas of gray hair" as Maria (Juliette Binoche), an aging European icon who's been talked into playing the older woman having an affair with a hot young heartbreaker-- a role she herself became a star via 20 years earlier. Kristen Stewart steals the show though, as Valentine, Maria's personal assistant, who handles her job with startling cool, knowing just how to rile or soothe or otherwise push Maria's buttons while juggling deals and cars and hotel rooms and interviews and meetings with photographers without ever seeming to break her cool detached stride or get mad at her cell phone. Chloë Grace Moretz is the rising star playing the younger part in the play; Valentine takes Maria to see the latest superhero movie which Moretz stars in, and Maria's mocking laughter (Val's a fan) gradually comes between them.

In other words, it's Bette Davis' The Star meets Petra Von Kant rehearsing a lesbian version of The Blue Angel at the Alpine lodge home of the play's recently deceased writer. It's these rehearsal scenes that carry the film. Stewart and Binoche connect with such quiet force that we understand immediately why Stewart won the César and the dialogue of the play within the film resembles their characters' own relationship and perhaps Stewart's real-life relationship with Alicia Cargile (left) so much it's (intentionally) impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins, except that the line-running they do feels real, while their sudden lurches into directly discussing their own relationship--Valentine complaining as Maria laughs at her impressions of the play's subtext--seems faked. and if Val and Maria themselves have any sexual history or present we never know. As the Binoche-Stewart personae (see what I did there?) merges into itself along with the two characters they're rehearsing via the actress and personal assistant they're playing... there's a sudden mystical shift that... well.. it doesn't work because the whole first 4/5 of the film has been this show business European fly-on-the-wall vérité so to suddenly move into a Freudian ego dissolution parable seems false, as if Assayas didn't trust the relationship to be good enough on its own - he had to keep adding layers until the whole thing deflates like an overdone soufflé. In other words, once again Assayas takes something that's working great, going somewhere new, and derails it with one too many affectations, the same way Irma Vep came to a standstill of pin-scratched Maggie outline celluloid, or that disturbing and strange demonlover denouement, or that so-what escalator in Boarding Gate.


If I'm being unfair, so be it. Most of the film is great, the scenery is staggering, the mountains a clue to the European intellectual heart, where German loftiness, Nordic depression, and French intellectual aesthetics sizzle together and align like constellations. Instead of the lofty cloud atlas stuff, I was imagining what if Bergman were directing, that he might go full-on post-modern and we'd maybe get an interview with Alice Cargile in between takes of the film within the play about a pair of women in a play. That might have worked, but whatever - the Melville of post-affect cinema transcends such things as satisfying destinations. The trip is where he works his magic. Once arrived, he's all out of rabbits.


One can't imagine either actual Hollywood or the Sils Maria bourgeois European intellectual community, i.e. Assayas, making a film like Maps to the Stars. A lurid, slow-burn haunted Hollywood saga of pyromaniac schizophrenics, ghosts, and egomaniacal stars and life coaches, it could only come from a Canadian indie auteur who doesn't need pretentious vanishings to craft a fiune Brechtian dissertation on aging actresses being intimidated by the younger generation. The similarities between the two films are striking: a behind and in front of the camera mirroring; passive aggressive sabotage by the older insecure actress against her personal assistant, and the merging of personae; the Twilight connection: Stewart in Sils, Pattinson (in a Cronenberg limo again) for Maps. Considering Stewart co-starred with Maps star Julianne Moore in Still Alice the same year (top), it's like an eerie reflection across continents, genres, and post-modern layers. But one is ballsy, the other just has a picture of ballsiness in its wallet. 


In both Sils and Maps there's the idea of being subsumed by another's ego, of being a young female employee trying to have a life while working for a solipsistic middle-aged actress dealing with the dwindling roles / loss of youth aspect. In Sils the assistant leaves without giving two weeks notice or even looking back; in the other... I can't spoil it, but it's far more satisfying. She leaves too, but we know just where she's going. There's a sense of unyielding fatalism, of the inexorable pull of madness so in sync with Los Angeles. 

Written by sordid show biz underbelly chronicler (and Castaneda mystic) Bruce Wagner (Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills), this is jet black satire of the type that knows every inch of what it's chronicling, and can match the darkness stab for stab. Everything connects: just as Melanie Daniels brought the bird attacks to Bodega Bay, young Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska) triggers an outbreak of specters upon her arrival in Hollywood. Her estranged brother, bratty child star Benji (Evan Bird), is haunted by a dying girl he does a Make a Wish Foundation visit to right before she dies; her employer, fading star Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore) is haunted by her crazy mom Clarice, who set their house on fire when Havana was a child, maybe. A new bio is being made and Havana is  fighting to play her, even while claiming she was molested and abused by her. Ingeniously, the ghost of Clarice is played by luminous hottie Sara Gordon (above, in the bath), just the right kind of weird mind melter that shows a real subversive instinct, the kind Assayas ultimately lacks, afraid, perhaps, of alienating the bourgeois fan base he won with Summer Hours.