The Clouds of Sils Maria

An old friend from high school commented on last week’s review of the sci fi movie Ex Machina when I posted it to Facebook. I recommended the movie, but my friend simply wrote “Dumbest movie I ever saw.” I laughed out loud, partly because I liked how it punctured my borderline pretentious review, but also because of how it highlighted the differences in what we value in movies. Ex Machina was slow and meditative, disturbing and ambiguous. For many people, that’s exactly the opposite of what they go to movies for. I get that because I like exciting movies too. I had as much fun this summer at San Andreas and Jurassic World as I did watching Ex Machina, but it’s different. Sometimes we go to the movies looking for the familiar, sometimes we want the strange. Both are good, but some people find more enjoyment in one than the other.

 This week’s film is more Ex Machina than San Andreas. The Clouds of Sils Maria was a darling of last year’s film festival circuit and is now available to stream or rent for those of us who don’t live near theaters that carry complicated, European-produced meditations on the passing of time, aging, and how the old are ruthlessly replaced by the young and how that replacement is inevitable.

The Clouds of Sils Maria focuses on Maria Enders, a successful stage and screen actress now in her 40s. As a young woman, she set the stage on fire in a play called Maloja Snake with her portrayal of a young woman who seduces and then abandons an older woman, leading the older woman to commit suicide. It was a star-making role that launched Enders into the kind of career that allows her to do sophisticated, high class projects but also get cast in X-Men movies.  Maria is on her way to accept an award on behalf of the writer of Maloja Snake when she gets word that he’s passed away. Not long after, she is offered a role in a new version of the play, only this time playing the older woman who gets seduced and kills herself.

 

Maria is encouraged to take the role by her devoted assistant, Val, played by Kristin Stewart. Val sees it as a way for Maria to reinvent and challenge herself and also a way to acknowledge her age gracefully. Maria, on the other hand, struggles with the idea of playing someone she thinks of as weak and old. As she and Val stay in the playwright’s old home in the Alps to work on the character, they argue over how to interpret her. Additional complication comes in when a rising young American actress named Jo-Ann is cast in Maria’s original role. Jo-Ann, played by Chloe Grace Moretz, is a hot mess – profane, impulsive, and ridden with scandal. Maria is horrified, but Val thinks it’s a great idea.

 There’s a lot of play-within-a-play overlap throughout the film as an older woman worries about playing an older woman to a powerful, seductive young woman while working with a powerful, seductive young woman. There are moments when Val and Maria argue as they hike around the amazing Swiss countryside and you’re not sure if they’re reading lines, talking about character, or really fighting. 

 

The film is fraught with ambiguity. Certain characters, even important ones, vanish from the film with no explanation. There’s no satisfying resolution at the end. There’s no on-the-nose explanation of the symbolism of the maloja snake, a real cloud formation that happens in the Alps near the area called Sils Maria. There’s so much that we are left do in this film. Some people will hate that. But if you enjoy not always knowing what’s going on and being asked to make some of the movie’s meaning for yourself, The Clouds of Sils Maria is a great film.

This review originally appeared on Q90.1, Delta College Quality Public Radio. For more information, go to www.deltabroadcasting.org.

Ex Machina

Science fiction movies often focus on the human race’s relationship with technology – what we might do with it and what it might do to us as it advances and becomes more and more an inherent part of our existence. Of course, some of the most memorable sci fi movies show how that human/technology relationship can turn really dysfunctional – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and its dispassionate killer artificial intelligence HAL come to mind. Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner are right up there too. There’s always an unsettling “What if” implied in films like that, and as we hand over more and  more of our lives and agency to smart phones, GPS, social media, and search engines, that “What if” becomes increasingly relevant. 

This week’s film, one you might have missed when it was in theaters, is Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Garland, the screenwriter of provocative sci fi movies like 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd, debuts as a director here working from his own script. 

Ex Machina takes place in a very near future. Donal Gleason plays Caleb, a talented but solitary programmer working for Blueblook, the world’s largest search engine. Caleb wins a company-wide lottery to spend a week with Nathan Bateman, Bluebook’s brilliant, reclusive founder, played by Oscar Isaac. Imagine the wealth, intelligence, ambition, and ruthlessness of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg combined into one person and that’s Bateman. When Caleb arrives at Nathan’s beautiful, half-subterranean estate, he discovers he’s not there just to hang out and drink beer with the boss. Nathan tells him he’s been selected to participate in a Turing test. That is to say that Nathan has created an artificial intelligence and he wants Caleb to see if he can tell whether the AI is human or not.

Nathan’s AI is a very human-seeming female robot named Ava played by Alicia Vikander. She has a human face, hands, and feet, and the rest of her is very obviously mechanical with circuits, wires, and machinery visible through her skin. Nathan developed her personality and behaviors by secretly harvesting the questions and searches entered by billions of Bluebook users. By seeing what people search for and how they search, he programmed Ava to simulate human thought.

In series of sessions, Caleb interviews Ava in her quarters while he sits in a glass box like an observation deck in a tiger cage. The more the two of them talk, the more charmed he becomes. Unexpected power outages at Nathan’s house cut the surveillance cameras, and in those moments of not being observed, Caleb discovers that Ava is causing the outages so she can tell him that Nathan is a liar and is not to be trusted.

 

Between sessions, Caleb and Nathan explore the woods, mountains, and waterfalls around the house and talk about what makes someone really human. In these scenes, two things happen: we get a good look at the Norwegian setting for the exteriors of the film which are stunning. More movies need to be filmed in Norway, I think. But we also get a longer glimpse into Nathan’s character and see what a prickly, unsettling, unpredictable person he is. His mentality about developing such a human-like AI is. “Hey, someone’s going to do it, so why not me?” The film doesn’t club viewers over the head with it, but it isn’t hard to make the connection between Nathan and the progress-at-all-costs-us-versus-them mentality of modern technology capitalism.

Caleb decides that Ava is human and that he wants to help her escape from what he sees as Nathan’s abuse and captivity. I won’t spoil what happens from there because I think you should see the film, but suffice it to say that, appropriately enough in a movie about artificial intelligence, not everything is as it seems.

Ex Machina is the kind of movie you want to talk about when it’s over. Is it a commentary on the sexualization and commodification of the female body? A cautionary tale about Internet privacy? A modern Frankenstein? A 21^st century Icarus? It’s a worthwhile movie that produces so many possibilities. It’s not a raygun and rocketship sci fi for kids. It’s an occasionally unsettling, complex adult fable and I recommend it.