Personal Shopper (MA). Director: Olivier Assayas. Starring: Kristen Stewart. 105 minutes
Maureen (Stewart) is a medium. At least, she might be — she's not sure. Cynical about the prospect of any kind of afterlife, she spends the early part of Personal Shopper holed up in an old Parisian mansion, trying to commune with the spirit of her recently deceased twin brother. Her experiences there, spooky as they may be, don't proffer any conclusive answers for her or the audience.
Maureen is currently employed by a difficult and demanding fashion model as a personal shopper; literally, she spends her paid working days buying clothes, shoes and jewellery for someone else. The juxtaposition of the pure materialistic focus of this work, and her doubt-riven incursions into the spiritual realm, is intriguing, even if it is almost too on-point not to be jarring.
Many of Maureen's interactions are mediated by technology. She has a boyfriend, but he is never physically present, appearing to her via Skype. Often we watch on as she frowns over her phone, reading and responding to text messages. Or the camera peers over her shoulder as she watches a video while travelling from Paris to London by train, disconnected from the people and places around her.
Even her most sustained engagement with the spiritual realm is so mediated. Maureen begins receiving text messages from a mysterious stranger, whom she suspects is a ghost.Assayas' direction and Marion Monnier's astute editing integrate these modern technologies into the fabric of the film, to both build suspense and to underscore Maureen's sense of alienation.
"It is a profound consideration of the processing of grief in a secular, consumerist society."
Stewart is captivating in the role. The erstwhile star of the Twilight franchise was once the subject of a meme lampooning an alleged lack of emotional range. But her expressiveness is in fact copious in its small details. Her deceptively opaque tone and mannerisms are perfectly suited to a character who at times appears passive but is endlessly grappling with complex ideas and emotions.
Personal Shopper was booed at Cannes (booing is a famous pastime at France's premiere film festival). It's easy to see why it was divisive. Its plot is a patchwork of riddles, many of which are left frustratingly unanswered. Still, it is at worst a suitably eerie contemporary ghost story, and at best a fresh and profound consideration of the processing of grief in a secular, consumerist society.
Tim Kroenert