B- Directed by Olivier Assayas Starring Kristen Stewart Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Olivier Assayas’ lengthy resume has been barely tapped into by this viewer, but what’s been seen is admired and sometimes loved. Summer Hours is one of the best films of the 21st century while Clouds of Sils Maria features exceptional acting from its main trio of actresses. One of those actresses, Kristen Stewart, returns to work with Assayas in Personal Shopper. Clouds of Sils Maria was one of several recent films that have established Stewart as a serious artist, obliterating the stink of the Twilight saga. Personal Shopper is another entry in her critical ascendance. Assayas has a habit of returning to the same actresses in his work, and while Personal Shopper can be irritating in its worldview for this skeptic, the partnership between the director and Stewart is plainly one that is working out for both of them.
Stewart plays Maureen, an unmoored and disinterested young woman working in the titular job for a celebrity. Looking as reedy and hollow as a heroic-chic model, Maureen recently lost her twin brother Lewis to a heart defect which she also possesses. In addition to faulty valves, the twins also shared an ability to commune with the spirit world, and pledged to each other that whoever died first would contact the other from the afterlife. Maureen would like nothing more than to quit her stultifying job and leave Paris for Oman, where her boyfriend currently is, but she is sticking around to wait for her message. It’s been months since Lewis’ death, but nothing’s happened.
Dramatic events occur in Personal Shopper, but Assayas backgrounds them to Maureen’s ennui. This classic trait of indie or highbrow cinema can be inert, and the Stewart of the Twilight films can certainly make her face and affect look dead. Here, it’s either the circumstances or her appreciating skills that turn the boredom of the economically comfortable into something more compelling. Assayas borrows from the Dardennes brothers by filming a long scene of Maureen on a moped navigating the Parisian streets, lending the scene an ethereal quality that complements how joyless this experience has become for Maureen. Stewart is doing subtle, indefinable work in communicating how badly she wants to be anywhere else.
In addition to a baseline of calm irritation, Stewart is showing off considerable range in Personal Shopper. Chasing spirits around a potentially haunted house is impressively physical, as the mere outline of her body in the dark is enough to show her nervousness and agitation. A centerpiece sequence involving text messages from unknown sources thoroughly breaks her out from any flatness, as she goes from impatience to self-loathing to stifled grief and misery. Personal Shopper is the most comprehensive work in Stewart’s continuing renaissance, appropriate as she’s onscreen for well over 90% of the runtime.
Despite Stewart’s achievements and Assayas’ reliable style and mood establishment, Personal Shopper is fatally flawed in how it discusses and approaches ghosts. Maureen is introduced inspecting the home that Lewis used to live in for spectral evidence, both because of her mission and because the future buyers want to make sure it isn’t haunted by anything malevolent. The film simply takes it for granted that ghosts are real, going on to show them with cheesy effects unbecoming of Assayas’ stature. It’s difficult for this viewer to get on the film’s wavelength if it’s going to assert something patently false as a true part of a world that in no way differs from the real one. Introducing a character as a medium marks them as an idiot or a thief and immediately puts them at arm’s length. Sure, a film can create whatever rules it likes, but something’s off in Personal Shopper. Maybe because there are no doubters, or maybe because the film never entertains the possibility that Maureen is just deluded by the significant loss in her life. It’s not an asset that I’ve spent so much time thinking about why the mythos of this film was so irritating, while in another recently watched film, I took it for granted that Michael Dougherty’s horror comedy Krampus contained a vengeful Germanic holiday demon.
The most frustrating aspect of Personal Shopper is that the concrete evidence of ghosts in the film doesn’t add anything compared to the alternative, in which Maureen entertains an absurd sentimental request at the cost of failing to distance herself from a life she hates. The insistence on ghosts’ existence is akin to fortune teller scenes in other films, another credulous trope I cannot abide. These kinds of things make people dumber instead of elevate them like Assayas’ previous films have done. Still, Stewart is so good that she makes Personal Shopper worth the frustration. At this point, she’s the female, late-20’s version of Nicolas Cage, another actor that everyone is sure is terrible when they’re in fact regularly capable of greatness. B-
Dramatic events occur in Personal Shopper, but Assayas backgrounds them to Maureen’s ennui. This classic trait of indie or highbrow cinema can be inert, and the Stewart of the Twilight films can certainly make her face and affect look dead. Here, it’s either the circumstances or her appreciating skills that turn the boredom of the economically comfortable into something more compelling. Assayas borrows from the Dardennes brothers by filming a long scene of Maureen on a moped navigating the Parisian streets, lending the scene an ethereal quality that complements how joyless this experience has become for Maureen. Stewart is doing subtle, indefinable work in communicating how badly she wants to be anywhere else.
In addition to a baseline of calm irritation, Stewart is showing off considerable range in Personal Shopper. Chasing spirits around a potentially haunted house is impressively physical, as the mere outline of her body in the dark is enough to show her nervousness and agitation. A centerpiece sequence involving text messages from unknown sources thoroughly breaks her out from any flatness, as she goes from impatience to self-loathing to stifled grief and misery. Personal Shopper is the most comprehensive work in Stewart’s continuing renaissance, appropriate as she’s onscreen for well over 90% of the runtime.
Despite Stewart’s achievements and Assayas’ reliable style and mood establishment, Personal Shopper is fatally flawed in how it discusses and approaches ghosts. Maureen is introduced inspecting the home that Lewis used to live in for spectral evidence, both because of her mission and because the future buyers want to make sure it isn’t haunted by anything malevolent. The film simply takes it for granted that ghosts are real, going on to show them with cheesy effects unbecoming of Assayas’ stature. It’s difficult for this viewer to get on the film’s wavelength if it’s going to assert something patently false as a true part of a world that in no way differs from the real one. Introducing a character as a medium marks them as an idiot or a thief and immediately puts them at arm’s length. Sure, a film can create whatever rules it likes, but something’s off in Personal Shopper. Maybe because there are no doubters, or maybe because the film never entertains the possibility that Maureen is just deluded by the significant loss in her life. It’s not an asset that I’ve spent so much time thinking about why the mythos of this film was so irritating, while in another recently watched film, I took it for granted that Michael Dougherty’s horror comedy Krampus contained a vengeful Germanic holiday demon.
The most frustrating aspect of Personal Shopper is that the concrete evidence of ghosts in the film doesn’t add anything compared to the alternative, in which Maureen entertains an absurd sentimental request at the cost of failing to distance herself from a life she hates. The insistence on ghosts’ existence is akin to fortune teller scenes in other films, another credulous trope I cannot abide. These kinds of things make people dumber instead of elevate them like Assayas’ previous films have done. Still, Stewart is so good that she makes Personal Shopper worth the frustration. At this point, she’s the female, late-20’s version of Nicolas Cage, another actor that everyone is sure is terrible when they’re in fact regularly capable of greatness. B-
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