Personal Shopper
Directed by: Olivier Assayas
Written by: Olivier Assayas
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie, Ty Olwin, Nora von Waldstätten
Drama/Mystery/Thriller - 105 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 15 Mar 2017
Written by: Olivier Assayas
Starring: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie, Ty Olwin, Nora von Waldstätten
Drama/Mystery/Thriller - 105 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 15 Mar 2017
One can make a case Personal Shopper is a sneaky sequel to Olivier Assayas’s previous film, Clouds of Sils Maria. Kristen Stewart, playing a character named Maureen this time, is a personal assistant once more to a globally-recognized celebrity. Key scenes occur on trains and the films even share four actors who starred in both of them. Kristen Stewart’s character Valentine inexplicably disappeared toward the end of Clouds of Sils Maria; she easily could have skipped over to Paris from Switzerland to begin the next episode of her life similar to the last one, replacing an actress employer with a supermodel and then settling in for a supernatural ghost tale on the side.
Maureen maintains a conflicted relationship with her daily chores as a personal shopper for haute couture clothes and jewelry. She rolls her eyes and insults her boss to other busy bees in the service industry, never to her charge’s face, and moans what a pointless role it is to fetch and return garments only meant to be worn once. On the other hand, Maureen lustily eyes the glamorous dresses and shoes and aches to try them on. Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten), the model, will not stand for anyone else wearing clothing meant for her, so the few times Maureen sneaks a fitting, we all get tense. Maureen takes her tasks seriously though; look at her grab and squeeze the jewelry she selects; she’s not poking and prodding, but methodically getting the true sense of a piece.
Maureen maintains a conflicted relationship with her daily chores as a personal shopper for haute couture clothes and jewelry. She rolls her eyes and insults her boss to other busy bees in the service industry, never to her charge’s face, and moans what a pointless role it is to fetch and return garments only meant to be worn once. On the other hand, Maureen lustily eyes the glamorous dresses and shoes and aches to try them on. Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten), the model, will not stand for anyone else wearing clothing meant for her, so the few times Maureen sneaks a fitting, we all get tense. Maureen takes her tasks seriously though; look at her grab and squeeze the jewelry she selects; she’s not poking and prodding, but methodically getting the true sense of a piece.
The reason for Maureen’s temp job as clothing assistant is she is waiting. Her twin brother recently died and she spends nights roaming around his empty country house waiting for a signal he is alright in the afterlife. It’s not a religious inquiry; Maureen says she is a medium and has access to channels with dimensions other than our own. I strain to imagine Maureen as one half of a set of twins. She is so isolated and morose, the result of intense grieving. Perhaps Stewart is so convincing in her portrayal that to even consider her smiling and happy with her other half is cognitively impossible.
Motor scootering around Paris and chunnelling over to London casts no impression on Maureen. She may as well be biking around New York City or Los Angeles. The way she ignores all cultural landmarks and significant sites may reflect her disinterest in life and her world-avoiding obsession with leaving herself open to paranormal signs. By far the best scene in the film is one of its most intense as Maureen encounters a being in the empty estate which neither she nor the audience is sure means well. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux (Arbitrage) lowers the camera with Maureen as she goes into a fetal position on the floor and we all gape in wonder at the spooky image attempting to communicate some sort of unsettling message into thin air.
Alongside the supernatural, Assayas overtly comments on our contemporary culture’s relationship with technology. Maureen’s most precious possession is her iPhone which she intimately curls up with at home, on the train, and in cafes researching obscure French spiritualists and watching old TV movies showing Victor Hugo interacting with ghosts in a seance. Maureen also launches into a back-and-forth, uncomfortable dialogue with a unknown phone number who probes her thoughts on fear and teases her with jests about who is really behind all the texting. Personal Shopper would benefit enormously if another editor reshaped the tedium of watching Maureen type a message and nervously twitch in her seat waiting for a response. I guessed the mystery early on, as I guess most audience members will, so any suspense Assayas believes he generates falls on bored ears.
Maureen is the personality antithesis of the warm and romantic girl she played in Café Society and the young, but confident lawyer in Certain Women. Those films are at least in the same film spectrum as Personal Shopper; Stewart’s work in the Twilight franchise and Snow White and the Huntsman might as well be the work of a different person. Co-winning Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, Olivier Assayas’s film was also booed, not a rare event at Cannes. I understand the divisive interpretations; open-ended conclusions left up to guess work will do that to a film. Her work in Clouds of Sils Maria earned Kristen Stewart the distinction of being the only American actor ever to win a César award and her efforts in Personal Shopper are just as strong. I prefer Sils Maria as the better film not because of subject matter, but because of Assayas’s eye-gouging message about technology, a thread struggling to fit in a film which would be stronger without it.
Comment Box is loading comments...
