Director Olivier Assayas is a notoriously difficult filmmaker to pin down, which is arguably the most stimulating trait one could hope to encounter in an artist. He flirts with genre conventions and mashes up cinematic clichés with a radical’s ferocity, and he possesses an inimitably French talent for seeming earnest and rascally at the same time.
Assayas’ latest, Personal Shopper, is one of his strangest films to date. It’s a puzzling cross-genre experiment built around the effortless allure of Kristen Stewart, who ricocheted so marvelously off Juliette Binoche in Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria. Stewart plays Maureen, the Paris-dwelling American personal shopper to a chic, renowned actress. This isn’t the sweet gig it might seem. Mostly Maureen putters around on her scooter buying couture outfits that cost more than the down payment on a modest house, all for a disagreeable woman she rarely ever sees.
Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene
Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more.
Her true passion is her sideline as a medium. Maureen’s methods aren’t those of a Victorian spiritualist showman. She roams about her client’s allegedly haunted properties and soaks up the ectoplasmic vibes, in the hopes that she will sense… something. Unfortunately, she is presently consumed by grief over her fraternal twin brother, who recently died of a congenital heart defect she shares, and her psychic abilities are accordingly not in prime form.
Things take a turn for the sinister when Maureen begins receiving anonymous texts from someone who appears to be watching her every movement. This stalker barrages her with vaguely menacing conversations in which they alternately pick at Maureen’s flaws and entice her into acting on her repressed impulses. Something about these texts puts an impossible notion into her mind: Could her dead brother be contacting her through her smartphone?
Personal Shopper encompasses a wild array of genres and tones. It seems to contain at least four divergent modes: a ghost story; a character study; a realist portrait of fashion and celebrity culture; and a 2010s Continental variation on a De Palma cat-and-mouse thriller. That Assayas manages to keep all of these balls in the air is impressive; that he finds ways for the film’s myriad aspects to bleed into one another is downright remarkable.
For viewers used to more rigorous focus in their cinematic storytelling, Assayas’ evenhanded absorption with Personal Shopper’s diverse elements could conceivably come off as exasperating. The director lavishes as much attention on Maureen’s harried selections in a Cardin or Vuitton boutique as he does on the wisps of spectral mist that follow her through a creaky house. Yet the marvel of Assayas’ film is that it mirrors the uncanny juxtapositions of real life. Even in the face of crushing grief, paranoid terror, and unexplained encounters, one still has to show up for work and deal with everyday frustrations. Stewart is in virtually every scene of Personal Shopper, and she is essential to the film’s success. Her performances always have an authentic, faintly off-handed quality, as though she were distracted by psychological vexations, a trait that fits this story perfectly.
Personal Shopper is long on enigmas and short on answers. Some of the feature’s most critical plot points seem to occur off-screen, and a couple of its loopier gestures are downright befuddling in their opacity. Even when it’s not always clear what the hell is going on, however, Assayas’ film is consistently seductive and unpredictable, like the best work of Polanski and the aforementioned De Palma. And whatever its flaws, Personal Shopper’s powerhouse final shot—in which Stewart’s face conveys one of the most complex, overwhelmed expressions in recent memory—is worth every narrative question mark.
Personal Shopper opens Friday, March 24 at Plaza Frontenac Cinemas.
