Clouds of Sils Maria

Tonight, BBC Two, 11pm

Two years before French arthouse director Oliver Assayas helped Twilight star Kristen Stewart cement her indie credentials by casting her in 2016 Cannes award-winner Personal Shopper, the pair made this film together. You could almost call it Stewart’s audition piece: in Personal Shopper she’s the star and the film’s main focus, but although she’s essentially playing the same character here (an uber-cool young American working as a PA in Europe) she’s a foil for the film’s true heavyweight – Assayas’s compatriot Juliette Binoche, for three decades now the toast of auteurs and cineastes everywhere.

That thespian mystique and the no-less ethereal world of premieres, festivals, interviews and photo-shoots that goes with it is Assayas’s subject matter in Clouds Of Sils Maria, as are the processes of writing, acting and film-making themselves. In that sense the film also recalls his 1996 work Irma Vep, in which he cast Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung as herself in a film about the making of a film which was actually a remake of an earlier film, silent classic Les Vampires. Confused? You wouldn't be the first to walk away from an Oliver Assayas film with more questions than answers.

Here, Binoche is French actress Maria Enders, celebrated star of stage and screen. The film opens in a train carriage. Maria, with PA Valentine (Stewart) in tow, is heading to Zurich to introduce a screening of a film by her great mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, the man who supplied her big break by casting her in his play Maloja Snake when she was 18. She played Sigrid, a young woman who seduces her much older female boss Helena, who subsequently kills herself.

When word comes through en route that Melchior has died, that introduction becomes a eulogy and Maria finds herself agreeing to star in a stage revival of Maloja Snake – this time playing Helena opposite young Hollywood bad girl Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz) – and rehearsing for it with Valentine in Melchior’s home at Sils Maria in the Swiss Alps.

It’s this that occupies much of the film and provides its intellectual weight. As Maria and Valentine bat lines backwards and forwards it starts to become hard to know where Melchior’s script ends and where aspects of the women’s own relationship is starting to intrude on the dialogue. If Melchior is intended as a sort of Ingmar Bergman figure then it’s hard to miss the comparisons with his free-wheeling 1966 puzzler Persona, in which lookalikes Liv Ullmann (playing an actress) and Bibi Andersson (as her nurse) trade identities while sequestered in a Swedish cottage.

Likewise it isn’t hard to see why Assayas cast Binoche as Maria though Stewart brings plenty to the party as well. As Valentine watches Jo-Ann and her married (British) A-list lover Christopher being chased by paparazzi you can’t not be reminded of Stewart’s own relationship with Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson and the press scrutiny it brought her. Nor should you, it’s one of the reasons Assayas cast her.

Too knowing? Too clever-clever? Perhaps. Clouds Of Sils Maria certainly won’t please everyone, particularly given a major plot twist at the end which is never explained and barely even alluded to afterwards. But if you enjoy films that make you think and don’t tie neat bows around every conundrum and conflict, then it’s worth the visit.

NOW STREAMING

The Servant, MUBI

Screening on the specialist streaming platform until the end of the month is this rarely-seen cult film from director Joseph Losey. Originally released in 1963 and based on Robin Maugham’s creepy and unsettling novella, it stars James Fox as wealthy man-about-town Tony, and Dirk Bogarde as Hugo, the man-servant he hires for his huge London pad. Adapted by Harold Pinter in the first of his three collaborations with Losey (the others were Accident and the Oscar-nominated The Go-Between) it uses typically sparse dialogue and striking image-making to tell a story in which the power balance between the men gradually changes until it’s not clear who’s the master and who’s the servant. Pinter has a cameo role and Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig also feature playing Tony’s girlfriend Susan, who’s immediately suspicious of Hugo, and Vera, introduced by Hugo as his sister (yeah, right) and soon living with him in Tony’s home.