Directed by Olivier Assayas
France, 2016
So what to make of Personal Shopper, this 2016 film starring Kristen Stewart and both written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Ghost story? Erotic thriller? Fashion industry satire – though with fewer jokes than Zoolander? Assayas zigzags his way through all of these genres, but the end result feels as uncertain of its identity as the prosaically named lead, Maureen Cartwright (Stewart).
Personal Shopper opens with Maureen arriving at an old house in the French countryside, a house full of shadows and creaky floorboards. She plans to spend the evening there alone, and after a few bumps in the night Maureen sees a genuinely unsettling apparition with a penchant for destroying crockery. We then learn that she is a medium, and that the house belonged to her recently deceased twin brother, Lewis, who was also a psychic. Not only that, but they share the same cardiac malformation that killed him.
You barely have time to register that far-fetched storyline before we are pursuing Maureen as she zips around Paris on a scooter, picking up exclusive designer outfits for her employer, model-cum-socialite, Kyra Gellman (Nora von Waldstätten). Maureen’s job is to select, buy, or borrow the clothes and jewellery that Kyra will wear when she’s stepping out with likes of Karl Lagerfeld, hence the film’s title. And there you have it: one foot in the material world, the other foot in the spiritual world – check!
Hanging out in the world of celebrity and haute couture does not appear to sit well with Maureen. In her few free moments she dresses down in a baggy sweater and pants, and displays a remarkable talent for doodling finely-detailed architectural sketches. But then events take a decidedly Hitchcockian turn. Some of Alfred Hitchcock’s great thrillers are set on trains: The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train. Assayas brings us up to date by sending Maureen from Paris to London on a Eurostar, but rather than a suspenseful journey across the English Channel we are subjected to a prolonged sequence in which Maureen receives a stream of creepy texts on her phone from a mystery stalker. And I mean prolonged. The resident ReidsonFilm Luddite took great umbrage here, but the others agreed: twenty minutes of watching someone texting on film is twenty minutes of tedium. Maureen speculates that the text messages may be from her dead brother… really?
Hitchcock was known for his considered introduction of the MacGuffin in his films. This is a device or gimmick, an item like a piece of jewellery, that is used to drive the plot forward but later turns out to be irrelevant. In Personal Shopper we have MacGuffins aplenty, including some prominently placed Cartier bling that Maureen picks up from their flagship store on the Rue de Paix. She slings the swag on the back of her scooter with all of the care of a Deliveroo driver.
There is, as expected, a murder. The victim is Kyra, her employer, but Maureen’s discovery of the blood-soaked body and the subsequent police investigation are dealt with in such a perfunctory manner, you begin to wonder if the plot of Personal Shopper is itself the MacGuffin.
…the idea of of doing a ‘whodunnit’ in a film with literally about four speaking characters - C
Where this film truly disappoints is in the waste of a mesmerising performance by Kristen Stewart. Despite the friends surrounding her, Maureen is alone and the camera tracks that solitude. It follows Stewart through the film, softly-spoken, low-key, a feline presence. And despite her often inscrutable expression, she conveys an aura of vulnerability and isolation that makes her always watchable. Even when texting. Her performance here makes the other characters immediately forgettable, including her boyfriend, who bizarrely only ever appears on Skype.
Maureen: I'm lost. I can't tell whether or not I'm going crazy.
But alas, what could have been a penetrating study of Maureen’s fracturing identity in the context of grief is dropped in favour of what turns out to be a haunted house story. But even here Assayas overplays his hand, leading to a risible set piece ending that was just too redolent of Bob Fossil and the floating cup from the TV comedy series, The Mighty Boosh.
Personal Shopper does not quite end there. A brief coda follows where Maureen flies to Oman to join her boyfriend, although when she arrives he is nowhere to be seen. But the scenery is fantastic. Oh, I get it… Maureen has left the material world of Paris for the spiritual world of the mountains of Oman – check!
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 50
T - 44
N - 50
S - 59
This time last year ReidsonFilm almost fell out over a film that was described as both an instant classic and an aesthetically painful experience.
People get funny in the wood sometimes
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Coming next… Gerry(2002)