dvd of the week
Olivier Assayas wrote and directed this gorgeous and slyly cerebral backstage drama about aging actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche) confronting her youth. In a play 20 years before, she became famous playing the ingénue who seduces an older woman, whose love and obsession drives her to suicide. Maria is asked to play the older woman in a revival (opposite Chloe Grace Moretz), and while she’s resistant, her assistant Valentine (Kristen Stewart) persuades her. The subtly Sapphic interactions between the great veteran Binoche and an astonishingly confident Stewart (who won the French version of an Oscar for her performance) are enough to make the film compelling, but the film works as a whole, too, in an enigmatic, profound, and very French way.
