Visto che non ci sono post da fare... in attesa di Kristen, ecco le prime recensioni:
To help her through this metaphysically trying time is assistant Valentine, here played by Kristen Stewart who delivers a performance of immense poise and texture, retaining good humour in the face of a full-time position which involves being locked in the professional mindset of another woman. Her character, replete with forearm tattoos, vintage band t-shirts and thick black-framed glasses, is one who initially seems like a satirical archetype of the carefree PR dolly, yet Stewart imparts an air of pensive solemnity, seldom exploding into grand, try-hard theatrics.
Stewart’s character is filling multiple roles, symbolically, here. But the one as a reflection of what Moretz’s character may wake up to in a few years, the next even more aggressive/abusive/self-trapped person behind her, closing even faster.
I have had the opportunity to chat with Kristen Stewart a couple times before Twilight and a couple of times since. I have never felt like the genuine person is being hidden. There is a lot going on in her world… and she has been tardy… and she seems genuinely unhappy being poked at by those near her and at a distance… and she may even be a brat at times, don’t really know. But I like the person I’ve met. And I like this performance as much or more than anything I have seen her do. She reads as the person I have met, having been given that room by the screenplay and Assayas, and Binoche. It often feels like a beautifully lit document of two women to whom ideas are important, who respect each other, and who are worldly, each at very much their own age.
There is some diverting interplay between Juliette Binoche (well cast as a grande dame) and Kristen Stewart (always good when embodying the slack spirit of what came after what came after Generation Z).
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Still, the picture is worth enduring for the performances by K-Stew and J-Bo. They are the only authentic things in a sea of contrivance and bad faith. Major prizes would come as a surprise.
Cannes Festival: Letter to... Kristen Stewart
Every day during the Cannes Festival, except during headaches and headwinds, Eric Libiot writes to one of the celebrities who walks on the daily red carpet. Letters in 3Cs: Caress, Praise or Slap (The 3 Cs only work in French - Duh). According to the delivery or mood. Today, the heroine of "Sils Maria"
Dear Kristen Stewart,
My apologies. My extreme, sincere apologies. I had not noticed you in the sharp "Twilight" series, meanwhile today, you shine in "Sils Maria" by Olivier Assayas. That being said, I have never seen "Twilight". Nor did I see "Fierce People", or "The Safety of Objects", "Catch That Kid", "Speak", "The Cake Eaters". It's almost a professional misconduct, even if at the moment, I can't recall a particular previous performance worthy of fireworks, if I may.
I can promise you that in the future, I will kneel to see your performances or I will crawl to get there. There hasn't been many impressive female performances this year - not really any big role either, in fact, - Except Marion Cotillard with the Dardenne brothers, Anne Dorval and Suzanne Clément with Xavier Dolan. But starting from where you did, your are without question, the revelation of the Festival. A tornado, a ray of sunshine, a Tagada strawberry, a slap, happiness.
Ironically though, your co-star, Robert Pattinson, also climbed the stairs this year, and twice. Evidently, the both of you do not even come close. He is still in the first grade while you're tackling Ivy League schools. And to see an actress blossom that much is one of the great pleasures of cinema.
It seems that you are capable of anything and everything: War movie, thriller, comedy, cream puff, roast veal, etc.. It looks like a menu rich in calories but anyway. I will be there. There's also "Snow White and the Huntsman 2". But what is that thing? And where is the Prince Charming? And what about the children, what do they do? You'll admit it's not easy to follow you. Do you do it on purpose? Are you testing your fans to see if they will follow? I will tell you right away, I'm here to stay. My degree of resistance is infinite. I've seen all of Alexandre Arcady's films, I can see all of yours. You are way prettier.
lexpress | Traduzione grazie a @SomeLostBliss
Yet Assayas is really more interested in the dynamic between Maria and Val (Kristen Stewart), the actor's personal assistant, who works her iPhone with one hand and her BlackBerry with the other. The relationship here is quite beautifully drawn, with Stewart again demonstrating what a fine performer she can be away from the shadow of Twilight.
The majority of the film’s two hours is devoted to scenes involving Binoche and Stewart, sometimes with others but mostly alone, so for anyone who enjoys watching these two excellent actresses knocking it back and forth as their characters cope with the myriad issues surrounding a performing career, there is much to behold. This is definitely an insider’s view, looking at things not in a salacious way but as a consideration of the way such lives are led and how past associations continue to impact decisions made in the present.
(...)
Binoche and Stewart seem so natural and life-like that it would be tempting to suggest that they are playing characters very close to themselves. But this would also be denigrating and condescending, as if to suggest that they’re not really acting at all. Their give-and-take and the timing of their exchanges, particularly in the rehearsal sequences, is wonderfully fluid and non-theatrical; Binoche works in a more animated register, which makes Stewart’s habitual low-keyed style, which can border on the monotone, function as effectively underplayed contrast. Moretz is all high-keyed confidence.
Given its narrow range of concerns, Clouds of Sils Maria will be mostly of interest to aficionados of theater, acting and the notion of how real and fictional lives can blur to those involved.
Binoche plays the role with elegance and melancholic wit – her character slips between fiction and fact in a way that recalls her role in Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, although Assayas’s film feels more rigidly constructed; not that that’s necessarily a criticism. But it’s Stewart who really shines here. Valentine is probably her best role to date: she’s sharp and subtle, knowable and then suddenly distant, and a late, surprising twist is handled with a brilliant lightness of touch.
It may be Chloe Grace Moretz's character, the outwardly bratty tabloid sensation Jo-Ann Ellis, who flips a middle finger at the camera, but it's the real Kristen Stewart, franchise-famous celebrity, who flips a middle finger at the critics in Clouds of Sils Maria. Olivier Assayas' thoughtful and intelligent meditation on acting, fame, and age doesn't just offer Ms. Stewart the best role of her life; it grants her a moment at center stage to lay out, in eloquent yet non-didactic terms, a defense of actors in the kinds of movies that sound a heck of a lot like Twilight.
While the meta moment fits snugly in the flow of this movie (and no doubt would work well with another talented actress delivering the lines) it's impossible not to imagine this as a K-Stew cri de coeur, a suggestion that those who have been slamming the Twilight films maybe should water down their haterade. Stewart gives a striking performance in Clouds. Her character Val, a personal assistant and rock of Gibraltar to Juliette Binoche's film and stage star Maria, is self-assured, crafty, honest, perceptive and even a little bit warm. It's a 180 from the dead-behind-the-eyes Bella Swan, yet there's the same flat delivery and crossed-arm presence. Here it radiates confidence, not Edward vs. Jacob indecision. Most of the film is just Stewart and Binoche in conversation, and Stewart more than holds her own. This film will fundamentally change your perception of this oft-mocked individual.
Playing an assistant to a famous actress, Kristen Stewart gave the Cannes Film Festival a self-referential and immediately acclaimed performance on the festival's final day.
Olivier Assayas' "Clouds of Sils Maria" premiered Friday at Cannes, revealing a new dimension of Stewart, acting in a European production alongside Juliette Binoche. As the cell-phone-tethered assistant to an international, revered veteran actress named Maria Enders (played by Binoche), Stewart's character is full of ironies.
When the two arrive in front of a sea of photographers, the paparazzi ignore Stewart, who rushes to open the door for her boss. Toggling through prospective roles for Enders, the "Twilight" star notes one that has werewolves "for some reason." And retelling tabloid stories about a famous, scandal-plagued Hollywood starlet (played by Chloe Grace Moretz), she defends it without a wink: "It's celebrity news. It's fun."
"For Kristen to play the assistant was hilarious," said Binoche. "Those kind of details she knows more than I do, in a way, because she's really in a world of paparazzi and all that. We had a lot of discussions about that."
Actors often come to Cannes to unveil a more artistically ambitious version of themselves. Stewart's "Twilight" co-star Robert Pattinson also drew raves earlier at the festival for his performances David Michod's "The Rover" and David Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars."
AP
But Stewart is the one who actually embodies what Binoche’s character most fears, countering the older actress’ more studied technique with the same spontaneous, agitated energy that makes her the most compellingly watchable actresses of her generation. Heightening the effect still further, Assayas uses the inescapable “baggage” of Stewart’s offscreen persona — from broken-marriage tabloid drama to a tossed-off eye-roll over the ridiculous rise in werewolf projects post-“Twilight” — to slyly alter the movie’s pH.
Variety
But Stewart is the one who actually embodies what Binoche’s character most fears, countering the older actress’ more studied technique with the same spontaneous, agitated energy that makes her the most compellingly watchable actresses of her generation. Heightening the effect still further, Assayas uses the inescapable “baggage” of Stewart’s offscreen persona — from broken-marriage tabloid drama to a tossed-off eye-roll over the ridiculous rise in werewolf projects post-“Twilight” — to slyly alter the movie’s pH.
Variety
Stewart has been a strange property during her time in Hollywood, her talents as an actress mostly untested (or, better put, ignored) in the Twilight franchise, despite showing signs of promise in films like Adventureland and The Runaways. Val is a complex role in which the actress never loses her real-life persona, instead embracing it to develop a dynamic with Binoche’s more classically moved performance. The two begin on a train to Zurich to honor Maria’s great collaborator, a German playwright who wrote the role that made her famous, when they learn the man has died. More than that, a young director hopes to re-stage the play with Maria once more, not in the lusting and forceful youth role, but as the suicidal, weak-willed, older woman.
In face of a strong competition line up, it seems unlikely that Clouds Of Sils Maria will be among the prizes. But it’s an elegant, intelligent drama, enlivened by strong performances by Binoche, Moretz and especially Stewart, for whom this will surely usher in a new dawn.
TotalFilm
An earnest Kristen Stewart, playing her personal assistant, prompts some of the film’s more difficult confrontations and underscores the latent talent that has been suffocated underneath the media hype. It’s an attractive pairing indeed.
screendaily
Juliette Binoche is pretty much destined to be overpraised for everything she does from now until the end of time, but she's earned that privilege, and here she's solid rather in spite of a role that is both overwritten and underdeveloped. But we can't go into the ecstasies that many have already expressed; despite some nice sparky chemistry with Kristen Stewart, it’s such a relentlessly self-serving, inward-looking role, and even at her best, the hall of mirrors refraction of playing a character so closely identifiable as a proxy for herself somehow diminishes Binoche's performance. As with one of the many pat dualities the film sets up, she’s an experienced, accomplished actress being asked to engage in a kind of postmodern experiment, but her considerable talents just aren't best served by this sort of approach and can find little purchase on such an illusory character. We're as surprised as anyone, but the major acting laurels on this particular occasion go to, wait for it, Kristen Stewart, who for our money delivers the better performance (and the film is mostly a two-hander between her and Binoche) and actually manages to make some of the thankless exposition and clumsy dialogue she’s given sound almost natural. Perhaps it’s because she’s playing a character that is not a version of herself—as much as the film comments on Stewart’s fame and peculiar type of celebrity, it does so largely through the medium of Moretz's Jo-Ann character, and so Stewart is free to just play a part and not navel gaze quite so much. In her guise as a personal assistant to a star, she can deliver observations about the nature of teen fandom and say stuff like “there are a shit ton of pre teens, so watch out” and we can all chuckle at the thought of the rabid 12-year-old ”Twilight” fanbase, but she is doing it from the safe distance of a role that is clearly differentiated from her, and in which she is natural and unforced.
indieWire
It's the artist-assistant relationship, played with good humor and mutual appreciation by Binoche and Stewart, that finally gives depth and definition to this cool breeze of a film: with Valentine seemingly the last remaining sounding board for the tetchy diva, Enders sees her only as an enabler, not as an individual; Valentine, on the other hand, stifles her own ego by attending so dutifully to another.
Enders' tunnel vision is such that she can't even see the ironies staring her in the face when she and Valentine rehearse scenes from a toxic relationship between older and younger woman; Valentine, however, certainly can. Delivering the film's most touching, textured performance, Stewart plays her gradual self-assertion beautifully, her signature underplaying building in light and shade, her sullen body language opening up as her co-star's turns appropriately tight and uncertain. There's a rueful twinkle, too, to her delivery as Valentine muses on the relentless pettiness of contemporary celebrity journalism. La Binoche isn't the only actress whose own career is under the magnifying glass here.
HitFix
An earnest Kristen Stewart, playing her personal assistant, prompts some of the film’s more difficult confrontations and underscores the latent talent that has been suffocated underneath the media hype. It’s an attractive pairing indeed.
screendaily
Juliette Binoche is pretty much destined to be overpraised for everything she does from now until the end of time, but she's earned that privilege, and here she's solid rather in spite of a role that is both overwritten and underdeveloped. But we can't go into the ecstasies that many have already expressed; despite some nice sparky chemistry with Kristen Stewart, it’s such a relentlessly self-serving, inward-looking role, and even at her best, the hall of mirrors refraction of playing a character so closely identifiable as a proxy for herself somehow diminishes Binoche's performance. As with one of the many pat dualities the film sets up, she’s an experienced, accomplished actress being asked to engage in a kind of postmodern experiment, but her considerable talents just aren't best served by this sort of approach and can find little purchase on such an illusory character. We're as surprised as anyone, but the major acting laurels on this particular occasion go to, wait for it, Kristen Stewart, who for our money delivers the better performance (and the film is mostly a two-hander between her and Binoche) and actually manages to make some of the thankless exposition and clumsy dialogue she’s given sound almost natural. Perhaps it’s because she’s playing a character that is not a version of herself—as much as the film comments on Stewart’s fame and peculiar type of celebrity, it does so largely through the medium of Moretz's Jo-Ann character, and so Stewart is free to just play a part and not navel gaze quite so much. In her guise as a personal assistant to a star, she can deliver observations about the nature of teen fandom and say stuff like “there are a shit ton of pre teens, so watch out” and we can all chuckle at the thought of the rabid 12-year-old ”Twilight” fanbase, but she is doing it from the safe distance of a role that is clearly differentiated from her, and in which she is natural and unforced.
indieWire
It's the artist-assistant relationship, played with good humor and mutual appreciation by Binoche and Stewart, that finally gives depth and definition to this cool breeze of a film: with Valentine seemingly the last remaining sounding board for the tetchy diva, Enders sees her only as an enabler, not as an individual; Valentine, on the other hand, stifles her own ego by attending so dutifully to another.
Enders' tunnel vision is such that she can't even see the ironies staring her in the face when she and Valentine rehearse scenes from a toxic relationship between older and younger woman; Valentine, however, certainly can. Delivering the film's most touching, textured performance, Stewart plays her gradual self-assertion beautifully, her signature underplaying building in light and shade, her sullen body language opening up as her co-star's turns appropriately tight and uncertain. There's a rueful twinkle, too, to her delivery as Valentine muses on the relentless pettiness of contemporary celebrity journalism. La Binoche isn't the only actress whose own career is under the magnifying glass here.
HitFix
9. Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz
Purely in terms of awards, Olivier Assayas’s very enjoyable The Clouds of Sils Maria was a big loser at Cannes—it didn’t win a thing. Yet this very entertaining story about an aging actress (Juliette Binoche), her personal assistant (Kristen Stewart), and a rising Hollywood star (Chloë Grace Moretz) will surely have a bigger commercial life than most of the official winners. And it reminds us that Assayas is one of the world’s great directors of actresses. While Binoche gives a skillfully overwrought performance, the movie belongs to Stewart, who hasn’t been this natural, relaxed, and lovely in years, and Moretz, whose every appearance gives the movie a jolt of movie star energy. Prizes be damned—these two were winners at Cannes 2014.
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