Personal Shopper
Stanley Kubrick famously once said he found ghost stories “optimistic” because anything involving the potential existence of an afterlife — even one plagued by terrors and demons — speaks to the possibility that there will somehow be more to experience at the conclusion of our lives.
Along those lines, Olivier Assayas, along with his “co-creator” Kristen Stewart, have, in Personal Shopper, forged a thoroughly fascinating film that works on multiple threads and tangents: At once, it is a ghost story, murder mystery, fashion treatise, millennial fantasia and philosophical rumination, all mashed together by the strength of Stewart’s guile, and Assayas’ wandering muse.
Stewart, with her perfect, angular jaw line, and deepset eyes that perpetually give her the aspect of a philosophy Ph.D. after pulling a Kierkegaard all-nighter, is perhaps the perfect millennial It Girl: No matter how stunning she may look, she carries with her the sense that she couldn’t care less, and has little to no interest in making an effort to do so. She does so much by doing so seemingly little, you can’t take your eyes off her. As is typical of her peculiarly slack energy, she doesn’t really walk in this film; when she’s not jetting through Paris on her Peugeot scooter, she lopes.
She plays Maureen, a young woman in Paris, working ostensibly as the personal assistant of highly visible fashionista Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten), but in actuality she is there for a very different reason: Months earlier, her twin brother, a furniture maker, died suddenly of a congenital heart condition they share, while living in a beautiful old mansion with his girlfriend. As she and her brother were both mediums, they had promised each other that whichever one died first would give the other one a sign of some kind, a firm indication that they were still out there, on one plane or another.
Listless and waiting to hear from her brother, Maureen spends her days tooling around Paris, going to various high-end boutiques and picking out one-of-a-kind pieces for the fearsome Kyra, spending her nights at her brother’s old house, in hopes that he will eventually present himself. The plot, such as it is, deepens on an excursion to London on the Chunnel, when Maureen begins to receive a series of mysterious texts, suggesting she’s being watched by someone she doesn’t see (at one point, wondering if her brother was contacting her at last). The texts start to raise increasingly difficult questions (“Do you ever wish you were someone else?”), which piques her interest even as she grows more wary of the tone of the conversation.
It is this element that finally starts driving the film’s level of suspense. Maureen’s curiosity escalates to the point where she eventually goes to a hotel room suggested by the mysterious texts, only to find more mystery and obfuscation once there. One early morning, returning to Kyra’s penthouse with several bags of Cartier jewelry, she discovers her boss’ murdered body in the bathroom. Soon, it becomes increasingly clear that the murder is somehow connected to the texts, and that the person behind them might be setting her up to take the fall.
Despite some of these plot mechanics, though, this is anything but a conventional sort of suspense thriller. In fact, in what would likely have been the film’s most dramatic action sequence, near the end, when police have finally caught up to the suspect, Assayas shows us only the beginning of the event, and even then only viewed through the heavy glass panes of the hotel lobby, largely off-screen and with the sound muted such as to indicate how little significance it holds to the film’s larger aspirations.
Needless to say, there is a lot at play here, an openness to inventive storytelling — the train-texting sequence alone is more than 15 minutes long, yet remains thoroughly arresting because of what it tells us about Maureen, and the way her generation communicates with the world, everything behind an internet veil. Indeed, Assayas incorporates a lot of technology in the film — Maureen also communicates with her IT boyfriend, stationed for a stint out in Oman, solely through Skype, but contrasts that casual millennial association against the most primitive and primordial aspects of human existence.
Despite the film’s myriad of other elements at play, it is, at its heart, a ghost story in the purest sense of the term. There are various flickerings of ghostly doings, including one sequence in which Maureen is confronted by a menacing, and apparently highly nauseating, phantasm in her brother’s old house, but again, in the places where you might expect Assayas to cue more strident inflections, he instead ratchets them way down, almost daring you to notice what’s actually going on in the background of some of the exquisitely composed shots of cinematographer Yorick Le Saux.
It is this subtlety that adds the extra flavor of intellectual discord to the film’s enigmatic ending. I was fortunate enough to see it again after its Toronto International Film Festival screening, and found numerous details, some quietly subtle, some beseechingly obvious, that I had missed before, many of which will no doubt catapult the film into the hothouse of post-screening cinematic debate.
With its heady agenda and crowd of ideas, the film could have failed in a multitude of ways, but fortunately Assayas and Stewart have created a vehicle both oddly voluminous and cleverly constructed enough to house all their disparate concepts. At times, these elements seem to be random, but because of Assayas’ penchant for downplaying the more outrageous and overtly dramatic sequences, it becomes some of these more understated details that truly haunt you afterward. The effect is like looking into a prism, with different versions of images all refracting against each other. Each vision is distorted, offering a poor idea of what it is you’re viewing, but taken together all at once, there’s a specific and enthralling kind of beauty in its colorful cacophony.