FRANCE, GERMANY, SVIZZERA

2014 – 35mm – color – 124’

Direction: Olivier Assayas

Screenplay: Olivier Assayas

Cinematography: Yorick Le Saux

Editing: Marion Monnier

Set design: François-Renaud Labarthe

Costumes: Jurgen Doering

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloë Grace Moretz, Lars Eidinger, Johnny Flinn, Angela Winkler

Producers: Charles Gillibert, Karl Baumgartner, Thanassis Karathanos, Jean-Louis Porchet, Gérard Ruey

Production: CG Cinéma, Pallas Film, CAB Productions, Vortex Sutra, Arte France Cinéma, ZDF/Arte, Orange Studio, Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS), SRG – SSR

SYNOPSIS

Maria Enders is an internationally-renowned actress. On top of her career, she agreed to star in the revival of the comedy that had made her famous twenty years earlier playing the role of Sigrid, a charming girl who drives her boss Helena to suicide. This time, though, Maria has been asked to play Helena, and this makes her rather uncomfortable, all the more so as the role of Sigrid has been assigned to Joe-Ann Ellis, a very talked-about young Hollywood star. In order to prepare for the role, Maria decides to retire, together with her assistant Valentine, to Sils Maria, a secluded village in the Swiss Alps.

CRITICAL NOTE

“What can leave us at once bewildered and fascinated is the way in which the director builds a changing narrative framework and then punctually dismantles it, avoiding its crystallisation into already seen theoretical forms to reaffirm, instead, a free and authentic desire for storytelling, for study and exploration of the complex psychological mechanisms of his protagonists. Assayas would need very little to make the specular relationship between Maria and Valentine on the one hand, and Sigrid and Helena on the other, theoretically expendable. A translation of the relationship between art and life, which Assayas has described many times, but this time he merely hints at it, making it present but never intrusive. And the same could be said of the relationship of the two leading women with nature, the Maloja snake that slowly glides over the nearby lake.” (Germano Boldorini, Pointblank)

PREMI AWARDS

2014 Prix Louis Delluc: Miglior Film Best Film

2015 Premi César Awards: Miglior Attrice non Protagonista Best Supporting Actress