Personal shopper explores love beyond the grave
“Every love story is a ghost story.”
This bewitching phrase has an odd and apocryphal history and was a favourite quote of David Foster Wallace’s. The literary critic Michelle Dean traced its apparent first use to a letter from the novelist Christina Stead to the poet Stanley Burnshaw.
But if every love story is a ghost story, is every ghost story a story of love? This is a sentiment Personal Shopper bewitchingly explores.
The film tells the story of a young woman named Maureen, played by Kristen Stewart with placidity and deep reserve, whose tedious, demoralizing job it is to buy designer clothing for a celebrity. By night, however, she is possessed of a more stimulating pastime. Maureen’s begun to cultivate a latent paranormal interest, and has found herself able to feel the presence of — and even communicate with — the dead.
This obliges the film to strike a divided style. On the one hand, it is a workplace drama about professional malaise. On the other, it is a supernatural thriller in which a budding medium communes with apparitions.
The competing styles are unified, under the deft command of director Olivier Assayas. Maureen mourns the death of her twin brother, Lewis, and in bereavement abandons herself obsessively to thoughts of the afterlife.
Night after night she returns to his now-empty home, alone, in an urgent bid to pursue any kind of meaningful sign from him. What she discovers instead is a corollary mystery: texts from an unknown number, enigmatic and teasing, that draw Maureen into what she believes is a running dialogue by iMessage with a sibling in the hereafter.
Assayas homes in on the intensity of conversation by text message, on the peculiar power of this form of communication and the ways in which it can still strike us as disturbing.
It’s in the very nature of the medium, Assayas suggests, to kindle unease. Another way to put it, is that every text message is a ghost story. Everyone we know, once reduced to words on the screen of our phones, becomes a phantom. Maureen texting Lewis would be hard to differentiate in character or kind from Maureen texting her boyfriend or her boss, a point Assayas makes elegantly.
“We never see each other,” Maureen complains early on about her ever-absent boss. “We just leave each other messages.”
It’s the relationship of two strangers, ghosts to one another always. Nor, tellingly, do Maureen and her boyfriend ever share the screen: they’re half a world apart and keep in touch exclusively over Skype. All of Maureen’s relationships operate at some degree of remove. So it’s not only her brother she aspires to contact; everyone she loves, everyone she knows, is a kind of spectre.
These are ghost stories. And every text puts her in touch with the dead.