MEDIOCREMOVIE.CLUB
  • Reviews
  • Side Pieces
  • Shane of Thrones
  • Podcast
  • About
  • Archives
  • Game of Thrones Fantasy

Personal Shopper

6/9/2018

0 Comments

 

B-

Directed by Olivier Assayas

Starring Kristen Stewart

Review by Jon Kissel

Picture

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-

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Side Pieces

    Random projects from the MMC Universe. 

    Categories

    All
    Action
    Adventure
    Author - Bryan
    Author - Drew
    Author - Jon
    Author - Phil
    Author - Sean
    Best Of 2016
    Best Of 2017
    Best Of 2018
    Best Of 2019
    Best Of 2020
    Best Of 2021
    Best Of 2022
    Best Of The Decade
    Classics
    Comedy
    Crime
    Documentary
    Drama
    Ebertfest
    Game Of Thrones
    Historical
    Horror
    Musical
    Romance
    Sci Fi
    Thriller
    TV
    Western

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    June 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015

    RSS Feed