Kristen Stewart well-cast in thriller
In Personal Shopper (2016), Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a young American woman living in Paris. “Waiting,” she tells friends and strangers.
French director Olivier Assayas appears to have tailored his screenplay to suit Stewart’s particular talent.
No longer is Stewart the insecure actress of the Twilight films (200812). Under Assayas’s direction, her passive face masks her character’s emotional isolation following her twin brother Lewis’s death.
Maureen has the same internal abnormality that caused Lewis’s heart attack, and requires annual medical check-ups to monitor her condition. Her reserve begins to dissolve when she visits the family’s vacated, country home near Paris.
The film’s opening scene has Maureen arriving at the empty house in autumn, proceeding through a gate, unlocking the front door and passing through a maze of interior doors to a veranda. She hears rumblings upstairs and calls out, “Lewis, that you?” Water gushes from bathroom taps.
Open doors are a cliché in fictional journeys into the unknown. Personal Shopper is not a conventional genre film. A hybrid drama/mystery/ thriller, its spare style and narrative are thoroughly modern and European — shot through with a thread of the uncanny.
Assayas has referred to movies as “expressions of our imagination … of our conscious and of our subconscious.” A couple wanting to purchase Maureen’s family home only notice the repairs to be done; they would welcome a benevolent ghost — a fad of contemporary gentrification.
Maureen finds no pleasure in her work as a personal shopper for a wealthy Parisian entrapped in social affairs and philanthropic causes. Assayas conceives of the client as a demanding fashionista, the type that fills the pages of glamour magazines and the pockets of designers who court rich women. Maureen confides to a friend, “I spend my day doing bulls---” selecting haute couture clothes and fetching Cartier jewels.
Maureen dresses plainly in jeans, leather jacket, tees and sneakers, essential gear for a mobile young woman who drives a moped like a racer oblivious of Paris traffic. She is stuck emotionally, waiting for a sign from her dead brother under a pact they forged as siblings. Assayas avoids stuffing the narrative with Hollywood excesses like evil twins or bad seeds.
The plot includes a murder, a chilling fashion crime efficiently solved by the police, a nod to the formulaic policier genre — and reminding me of a comment by a cynical fashion editor, “Glamour kills.” No joke.
The most intriguing narrative twist is the intense texting between a stranger (it seems) and Maureen as she travels by train to London on behalf of her wealthy client.
Who or what is this intrusive force interrogating Maureen about her purpose in life? Why does she confirm for the inquisitor her dislike of horror films? Is this a cellphone stalker or a symptom of Maureen’s anxiety? Or, the director’s critique of social media and small-screen viewing? Back in Paris, Maureen succumbs to the stranger’s message urging her to try on her client’s clothes, forbidden for personal shoppers. Stumbling in stilettoes and indifferent to sequined and bondage dresses, she flops on the bed in a stupor.
Assayas’s open ending has Maureen far away from Paris, seemingly acknowledging her obsessions as if a
disabling sixth sense: “I don’t know you.” “Who are you?” “Or is it just me?”
As viewers we might speculate that Assayas redresses Stewart’s image in the Paris couture scene as muse and model for designer Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel label. If Stewart is also Assayas’s muse, which she seems to be following two films under his direction, he grounds her character Maureen in the everyday street wear the actress herself favours out of the celebrity spotlight.