Clouds of Sils Maria
Meta film about a play that was to be adapted into film. Juliette Binoche plays almost herself, being tormented by her lack of youth, personified by Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz.
The title refers to a mountain range in Switzerland, where the mountain configuration mixed with a certain kind of cloud leads to fantastic images, featured in the film.
The play concerns Helena and Sigrid: a middle-aged woman being driven to suicide by a manipulative ingénue. It could also portray a self-destructive businesswoman throwing herself into the rocks of an impossible romance. Nearly every character reads a different story from the same words.
Kristen plays the assistant who slowly transforms into a character in the play. Their rehearsals quickly meld into fights, but the outcome is reversed: the youth retreats in defeat. Maybe Val was Helena all along?
The director did Irma Vep some years before and this fits the same vein and cinematic style.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.