CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Starring: Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Chloe Grace Moretz

Writer: Olivier Essayas

Director: Olivier Essayas

Veteran actress Maria Enders (Binoche) agrees to appear in a revival of a play that made her famous a couple of decades ago and goes through various personal and professional crises as she prepares for the role with her assistant Valentine (Stewart) in the Swiss residence of the play's author, who has recently passed away. Also lined up to appear in the production is tabloid sensation Jo-Ann Ellis (Moretz) who is tired of appearing in big-budget blockbusters and wants to try her hand at something deeper and more serious. Much soul-searching ensues, life begins to imitate art, and so on, and so on...

Having read several "proper" reviews of this and seeing the praise lavished upon it I initially felt a bit of an idiot for feeling distinctly underwhelmed as the end credits rolled. In the one corner there's all of these really well-read, well-educated, intelligent reviewers (all of whom I admire, most of whom I admire greatly) lining up to profess their love for this picture and in the other corner there's me, grumping about how I didn't get it. It's the guy who loved Mad Max: Fury Road being completely stumped by an arthouse movie. Give him this DVD of a tractor-pulling contest and make sure he watches it rather than eats it.

Okay, so now I've painted myself as someone whose favourite movie is "PoIice Academy: Mission To Moscow", I should 'fess up to actually liking things such as subtext and subtitles and I really wanted to love this movie if for no other reason than the fact that Juliette Binoche is an astonishingly good actress who can generally elevate anything in which she appears, be it classic or clag. As great as she is here - and, believe me, she's never less than one hundred per cent convincing - the airless plot renders the proceedings down to creative types whiffling on about their craft and coming to very few conclusions in the process.

I was waiting for the moment where things came to a head, where everything boiled over and all of that build-up led to a smart, satisfying resolution but when the movie did eventually get to its point my initial reaction (and the reaction I still have from thinking about it) was "Is that it?". I'm not saying I wanted an epiphany so extreme that it made a nonsense of everything that had gone before it but surely there was an epilogue that could have satiated its audience far better than the almost apologetic shrug of a finale that I was left with here.

Okay, enough about the anticlimactic resolution and back to the performances. Kristen Stewart, she of much Twilight-related flak, is equally terrific but again my interest was held due to her considerable screen presence rather than anything she's given to do in terms of the story (which, it turns out, ain't all that much). Moretz is engaging as the troubled teen star but her role is something of a cypher and the YouTube "footage" of her appearance on a trendy talkshow is laughably artificial. For a film that's going for subtlety her character is a clunking mass of misbehaving celeb tropes, totally at odds with how the two leads are drawn.

Don't get me wrong, this could have been a superb movie - and, for some people, it obviously is a superb movie - but for me the pace of the film was unnecessarily funereal and the dramatic points were either thumpingly overwrought (death, attempted suicide, paparazzi pursuits) or so low-key that they vanished altogether without even disturbing the dust on this rather precious fragment of thespian angst. Lovely shots of the Swiss countryside and its beautiful mountain ranges, though. Maybe if the film had been two hours of those achingly pretty vistas I would have emerged from the cinema with a smile on my face. Sorry, Mme Binoche, I really didn't want to have a pop at your film. You're still amazing, though.