Olivier Assayas: please let your lesbians be lesbians
Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Irma Vep (1996)
Revisiting: Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) and Irma Vep (1996)
Olivier Assayas employs queer desire as a vehicle for thematic exploration, but not much more
“I’ve always been straight,” says Maria Enders, and many other extremely heterosexual women, probably. Still from Clouds of Sils Maria.
I watched director Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014) on a Kristen Stewart binge. Despite her breakout role in the rigidly heterosexual Twilight films (we’ll talk about that someday), Kristen Stewart is the darling of queer women in Hollywood. She’s openly bisexual, frequently portrays queer women on screen, and she looks like this.
With the casting of Kristen Stewart opposite Juliette Binoche in a film where an aging stage actress and her young assistant retreat to the Swiss mountains to rehearse a play about lesbian lovers, I thought this movie would be…well, gayer. Now, having revisited other films in Olivier Assayas’s catalogue (specifically his 1996 film, Irma Vep), I question whether or not these films can be considered queer cinema at all.
Just a couple of gals being pals. Still from Clouds of Sils Maria.
In Clouds of Sils Maria, Maria Enders (Binoche) is an aging actress who has decided to take part in a new production of the play that made her famous as a young woman. The play centers lesbian lovers, one young and one older, with the cruel young woman eventually abandoning the more pitiful older woman. Maria once played the young woman, but now, in the revival, she will be playing the older woman. She and her personal assistant Val (Stewart) head to Sils Maria, the play’s Swiss mountain setting, to help Maria prepare for the production.
“I’ve always been straight,” Maria declares near the beginning of the film. As she and the play’s director discuss her original role, Maria makes it clear that she never identified with the lesbianism of the character, but rather the personality — her strength, her freedom, and her youth. Anything but her sexuality.
Similarly, Maria’s assistant Val engages in a brief casual relationship with a man near the beginning of the film, quickly telling us that Val is interested in and involved with men. The text does not permit either woman to be interested only in women, and lesbianism is hurriedly shuffled away into the shadows.
Still, subtextual queer tension builds throughout the film. They ambiguously read lines together (are they speaking as themselves or as the play’s characters?); there’s a stolen glance here, an intimate conversation there, even a skinny dip in the lake. But Maria and Val never kiss or have sex — they barely touch — and the fact of their obvious attraction is waved away at every turn.
In Irma Vep (1996), considered to be Olivier Assayas’s masterpiece, another queer relationship is handled similarly. Irma Vep stars Maggie Cheung as an actress (herself) filming the remake of a classic French film. While on set, Maggie’s costumer, Zoe (Nathalie Richard) becomes interested in her.
Having a great time with a straight friend. Still from Irma Vep.
Their relationship is warm and sensual. During a costume fitting, Zoe dresses Maggie in a latex Catwoman suit in a sex shop dressing room. As Zoe pulls the material to get the correct fit, the sexual tension radiates. Later, Zoe takes Maggie to her home for a late night dinner party, where Zoe admits to a friend that she’s turned on by the actress and wants to know if Maggie is into girls.
Even though Assayas affords Zoe the luxury of being openly queer in Irma Vep, he nevertheless employs the same textual straight-hand-waving we see in Clouds of Sils Maria. Maggie claims she’s “never thought about it” when asked if she’d like to sleep with Zoe (though her body language communicates something else entirely). In another scene, the two women are going to a nightclub together, when, abruptly, Maggie decides she’s tired and would rather go home, leaving the sexual possibility entirely unexplored.
In both Irma Vep and Clouds of Sils Maria, romantic and erotic tension is intimately and beautifully portrayed by both couples. Watched individually, a viewer might understand either of these films as a meditation on longing, maybe similar to the understated eroticism of In the Mood For Love (another Maggie Cheung film, incidentally), where the portrayal of desire is heightened by the fact that we never see the lovers kiss. However, taking together Clouds of Sils Maria and Irma Vep and knowing that nearly two decades separate their production, it becomes frustratingly clear that perhaps Assayas is not interested in the complexity of queer love and desire at all. Rather, queer desire functions solely as an aesthetic or as a metaphor in films far more interested in other thematic elements than the actual content of women’s love and desire for each other.
In Clouds of Sils Maria, the relationship between Maria and Val is not really about queer desire. Instead, it is a vehicle for Assayas to show Maria’s relationship to aging. Val functions less as a romantic or sexual interest for Maria, and more as an object for idealizing youth. Much like Maria’s understanding of her character in the play (“I’ve always been straight”), Maria doesn’t care about lesbian desire. She cares about holding onto an idea of herself as a free young woman, and she does so by desiring Val.
In one particularly charged scene, Maria and Val view a sci-fi movie featuring the starlet Hollywood actress Jo-Ann (Chloë Grace Moretz) who will be playing the young woman in Maria’s upcoming play. Maria and Val disagree on the film; Val finds the performance raw and emotional, and Maria thinks it’s low-cinema. Maria, frustrated, asks Val why she admires this other actress. The implication is that this is a romantic jealousy, but I argue that it is not. Maria is intimidated by a new guard of young actresses like Jo-Ann and by Val’s critical eye for film and performance, neither of which she understands. She is desperate to hold on to a person she no longer is and an acting scene that no longer exists. This longing is then channeled through the subtext of queer desire for Val.
Similarly, in Irma Vep, the relationship between Maggie and Zoe is ultimately secondary to the metatextual concerns of the film. Their barely hinted-at sexual involvement is an aesthetic sheen atop a movie that is primarily about satirizing the French film scene and depicting the messiness of filmmaking and the labor that goes into it.
In the aforementioned dinner party scene, the tension between the two women peaks after Zoe confesses her interest in Maggie to a friend. However, the scene’s focus is not the desire between these two women. Instead, the focus is a look at the intimate lives of film crews as they chat, eat, gossip, and flirt. Essentially, Assayas wants you to know that there are real people and there is real work behind the art you consume. The group watches Class of Struggle, a documentary about a union, and a banner on screen reads, “Cinema is not magic; it is a technique and a science, a technique born from science and put in service of a will: the will of workers to liberate themselves.” Alright, so the scene is about labor. What, then, is the function of unconsummated lesbian desire here? Is it to truly say something about queer women and their lives, or is it to employ queerness for aesthetics only to sweep it back into the closet later?
Still from Irma Vep.
Looking at these two projects together, nearly 20 years apart and in vastly different political contexts for queer people, it seems to me that Assayas is not interested in understanding queer desire as much as he likes to use queer desire to talk about other things he deems more interesting. Moreover, Assayas’s queer women are almost always inexplicably involved with men, and he refuses to commit to showing a lesbian relationship without confusion or ambiguity (which might have been excusable in the 1990s, but definitely feels dated in 2014, when Clouds of Sils Maria was released). Though I enjoy both these films immensely, it is difficult for me to call them queer cinema, when queer desire is never allowed to move into the light, only to exist as an unanswered question.
What if filmmakers as respected, talented, and creative as Assayas took seriously the complexity of queer women’s relationships? Something like Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire comes to mind—a film that (much like Clouds of Sils Maria) examines the impossibility of a lesbian relationship, explores themes of art-making and visual mediums, but does so fearlessly, without any hesitation to show women in a fiercely romantic, sexual relationship. In Assayas’s films, it’s frustrating and disappointing to see queerness repeatedly used as an aesthetic choice or an expedient metaphor, instead of something valuable or fascinating in itself, then moved quietly back to the shadows once it has served its purpose. Certainly, queer women’s lives are interesting, multi-faceted, and worthy of direct, unblinking storytelling in film. Directors making queer movies should know this better than anyone and strive to get it right.
What’s Next
My second Sundance review! I was going to send it today, but wanted to get this Assayas one out to show the variety of pieces you might see in this newsletter.
What else did I watch this week?
Promising Young Woman (2020), and I greatly appreciated Carmen Maria Machado’s piece on it to contextualize. Malcolm & Marie (2021)…Yeah. And Birds of Prey (2020), which is an extremely fun entry in the “Good for her!” cinematic universe.
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