Personal Shopper
Dir Olivier Assayas, France/Germany 2016 On UK release from 17 March
Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is personal shopper for demanding, mega-famous, trend-setting celebrity Kyra (Nora van Waldstatten). Dashing around Paris and London, choosing and collecting clothes and accessories, Maureen is the de facto standin for her client, employed because she knows Kira’s taste and how to make her look good. But Maureen is dissatisfied, not just with her job but with her life; she is mourning the death of her twin brother who passed away some weeks before from a heart condition. Like him, Maureen reckons herself to be a medium, a spiritualist in touch with a world beyond our own. Holding to a pact made with her brother, Maureen is waiting for a sign from him to prove there is life after death.
Director Olivier Assayas presents for our consideration a series of dualities: haves and have-nots, on the most basic level; personal and public; sophistication and naiveté; body and soul; and the biggie – life and death. They are presented through visual oppositions: swanky penthouse flat versus old dark house; city versus country; fashionable versus scuzzy; and, ultimately, clothed versus naked. All of this is bundled together in a package that is itself a clash between two film genres: glossy thriller and gothic horror. These contrasts are pulled together with skill, and the opposites meld into each other rather than jarring.
An intriguing æsthetic then, and in service to an equally intriguing structure; however, the film has some serious flaws which conspire to render it a failure. Foremost among these is Kristen Stewart’s performance as Maureen. Stewart has undeniable star quality, but at this stage of her career she simply does not have the acting chops to carry a film, particularly one as intense as this, without heavyweight support to help her out. Maureen is at best a rootless character, at worst someone who is losing her mind, but Stewart plays it all with the same collection of shrugs, stammers and furrowed brows. For a film that rarely has her off screen, it’s a fatal flaw. The dialogue is often banal and on occasion risible; describing her encounter with a malign female apparition, Maureen says: “She vomited some ectoplasm and left.” There is a lengthy, crucial section of the film where Maureen is plagued by text messages, which may or may not be coming from the beyond. Technology means that sequences like this are perforce creeping into cinema, but sending and receiving texts is hardly cinematic stuff.
There are moments when Assayas’s skill as a technician shines through: such as when Maureen’s inbox fills with messages, each of which indicates her stalker is getting closer and closer, and a remarkable glide out of a hotel elevator, through the lobby and out into the street. Both sequences recall Hitchcock at his best, and I imagine he would have had a field day with this material. Sadly, such moments are too infrequent to rescue the film; the idea might have been to set up an opposition between 21st century thriller and 19th century Gothic chiller, but this offers little of either.
Fortean Times Verdict
More Like ratners than Cartier unfortunately 6