Personal Shopper
People who don’t get Kristen Stewart, and just don’t like her performances, may take some comfort in “Personal Shopper.” Here she really is as bad as they say she is — mannered, faux distracted and relying on tricks to indicate an authenticity that isn’t there, such as rushing through lines of dialogue in concentrated bursts of attention.
But no, the real truth is complicated: Stewart really is one of our best young actresses. And yet yes, she really is awful in this movie. And “Personal Shopper” is an embarrassing mess. It was booed when it debuted at Cannes last year, and the only mystery now is how there was any audience left in the theater to boo.
It was written and directed by Olivier Assayas (“Summer Hours”), a talented director who is always interesting, and you could say he’s still interesting here, in that “Personal Shopper” is no generic bad movie. It breaks new ground.
Stewart plays a young woman whose twin brother has recently died of a congenital heart ailment that she also shares. At the start of the movie, she is walking through the house where her brother once lived, trying to make contact with his spirit. A spirit seems to show up — behind her — but he stalks away like the ghost in the first scene of “Hamlet.” (These ghosts never talk the first time out. They have to work up to it.)
You might ask yourself, “How could a director make someone walking through a haunted house boring?” Well, Assayas manages it. Every creak on the stairs, every squeaking door, every bend in the floorboards is 100 percent dull. This scene doesn’t need a review, but a frame-by-frame film school autopsy.
Fortunately for Maureen (Stewart), she has other things going on in her life. She is the personal shopper for a nasty, selfish, imperious celebrity, one of those famous people who have to keep showing up in places wearing a new outfit. This aspect of the movie is, for a time, fairly interesting. Maureen goes around to high-end shops in Paris picking out clothes and writing checks from the woman’s account.
The one positive achievement of “Personal Shopper” is that beautiful clothing has never seemed so meaningless, so pointless, so flimsy, so much an adornment of nothing as it does here. Whether on hangers or being touched by Stewart’s examining fingers, the clothes suddenly seem like a ridiculous series of Halloween costumes.
Stewart is lucky in her acting technique in that, even at her least convincing — even when she seems to be making a show of observing and choosing clothing — she can be fun to watch. Good or bad, she’s always idiosyncratic, and she tries to keep Assayas’ effort aloft. She can’t.
The pleasure fades after about 30 minutes, as the truth sets in that “Personal Shopper” is going to be nothing but a series of dead, empty scenes, mostly with Stewart in close-up or medium shot, either listening for bumps in the night or choosing her boss’ next outfit. The movie is so badly structured that, near the finish, every scene seems like the end. Any end would have been welcome. Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle