Here's a review of the 2016 film "Personal Shopper."
Personal Shopper (2016)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Nora Waldstätten
Four stars (of five)
Some movies are ghost movies; some movies are about finding yourself; some movies about loneliness; some movies are advertisements for individual superstar actors; some movies are 21st century cyber-security PSAs, while some are timeless European romantics. Rare is a movie that combines so many of this disjointed templates at once. Rare, indeed, is Personal Shopper.
Reuniting with Stewart after 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria is director “fade to black” stylist Olivier Assayas. Here he’s traded sweeping panoramas of stunning Switzerland for his native Paris without missing a beautiful beat. Assayas clearly has a genuine eye for country and the city - a certain sequence will surely remind the viewer of Sils Maria, as we’re taken on a sleepy drive through, of all places, “The Sultanate of Oman,” by a “spartan” chauffeur named Saleem; while in others, Paris sparkles in the rain, contrast around every blurry corner. Like Sils Maria, the camera’s direct attention hardly deviates from Stewart’s seduction. If the 2014 effort successfully introduced Stewart as a “good actor”, as opposed to just a gimmicky one, Personal Shopper confirms it - she’s actually terrific. Hardly a single take passes without Stewart (Maureen) front and center, and the film is better off for it. She mixes her sincere talent in many scenes with what could only be described as inexperience in others, and is an ideal focal point for this inconsistent tale.
Maureen lives and works in Paris after the tragic and unexpected passing of her brother Lewis - both were mediums (though, as one character shrugs, “I don’t even know what that means”), and Maureen passes time until Lewis makes good on a promise to initiate contact by serving as a, you guessed it, personal shopper for Kyra, a lavish fashion icon, wandering the designer stores and dressmaking shops of Paris with blank checks and a scrupulous eye.
Visits to the shuttered countryside mansion where Lewis passed are facilitated by Lewis’ widow, Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz). Maureen fearlessly wanders waiting for the sign that she’s quickly losing faith will come. She toils and shops, stressed, anxious and alone, until an unknown texter enters the fray, with messages suggesting she’s being watched. “R U real?” she asks (Assayas is surely many things, a talented director among them, but “in touch with how the youth text” isn’t high on the list, apparently), wondering if this tease is Lewis’ way of closing the door so Maureen can move out of the shadow of her melodramatic employer and get on with it.
Maureen allows the unknown texter to toy with her, even going so far as to take instructions from him (her? it?) during one fleeting, oddly erotic exchange (that just always seemed to be right around the corner), still unconvinced that her brother would take this route. Ultimately she’s right to be confused, for one reason or another, as she’s given a key card to an empty hotel room paid for in cash, listed under her name, and is nearly framed for an act that she played no role in; someone has her by the neck, and there are growing concerns as why, if it is Lewis after all, his intentions are malicious.
Maureen will eventually get some of the answers she’s looking for, as will the viewer, though there are plenty of doors left open. “Lewis, is it you?” she asks, when she’s sure she’s ready to close the door. Is Maureen visited? Is she being watched - if so, by whom, and to what end? If not, what will it take for her to convince herself that this chapter is closed? Lara, surely equally heartbroken, has managed to move on; what prevents Maureen from doing the same?
Personal Shopper is one hundred minutes positively littered with bizarre and, frankly, hilarious quips (“It’s extremely difficult to find a portal into the spiritual world. It’s just the way it is” / “You just need to avoid intense physical efforts, like Lewis did - he built cabinets” / “He cares deeply about gorillas”) and scenes flow as if they’ve been cut and pasted from decades of movie-making history. Assayas provides no real indication as to where the inspiration for the messy, eccentric, thrilling storytelling comes from. Some movies are really good; some movies are right terrible. Personal Shopping manages to be both, and quite a bit more, at once.
Jeff Schwartz
2/13/2019
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Nora Waldstätten
Four stars (of five)
Some movies are ghost movies; some movies are about finding yourself; some movies about loneliness; some movies are advertisements for individual superstar actors; some movies are 21st century cyber-security PSAs, while some are timeless European romantics. Rare is a movie that combines so many of this disjointed templates at once. Rare, indeed, is Personal Shopper.
Reuniting with Stewart after 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria is director “fade to black” stylist Olivier Assayas. Here he’s traded sweeping panoramas of stunning Switzerland for his native Paris without missing a beautiful beat. Assayas clearly has a genuine eye for country and the city - a certain sequence will surely remind the viewer of Sils Maria, as we’re taken on a sleepy drive through, of all places, “The Sultanate of Oman,” by a “spartan” chauffeur named Saleem; while in others, Paris sparkles in the rain, contrast around every blurry corner. Like Sils Maria, the camera’s direct attention hardly deviates from Stewart’s seduction. If the 2014 effort successfully introduced Stewart as a “good actor”, as opposed to just a gimmicky one, Personal Shopper confirms it - she’s actually terrific. Hardly a single take passes without Stewart (Maureen) front and center, and the film is better off for it. She mixes her sincere talent in many scenes with what could only be described as inexperience in others, and is an ideal focal point for this inconsistent tale.
Maureen lives and works in Paris after the tragic and unexpected passing of her brother Lewis - both were mediums (though, as one character shrugs, “I don’t even know what that means”), and Maureen passes time until Lewis makes good on a promise to initiate contact by serving as a, you guessed it, personal shopper for Kyra, a lavish fashion icon, wandering the designer stores and dressmaking shops of Paris with blank checks and a scrupulous eye.
Visits to the shuttered countryside mansion where Lewis passed are facilitated by Lewis’ widow, Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz). Maureen fearlessly wanders waiting for the sign that she’s quickly losing faith will come. She toils and shops, stressed, anxious and alone, until an unknown texter enters the fray, with messages suggesting she’s being watched. “R U real?” she asks (Assayas is surely many things, a talented director among them, but “in touch with how the youth text” isn’t high on the list, apparently), wondering if this tease is Lewis’ way of closing the door so Maureen can move out of the shadow of her melodramatic employer and get on with it.
Maureen allows the unknown texter to toy with her, even going so far as to take instructions from him (her? it?) during one fleeting, oddly erotic exchange (that just always seemed to be right around the corner), still unconvinced that her brother would take this route. Ultimately she’s right to be confused, for one reason or another, as she’s given a key card to an empty hotel room paid for in cash, listed under her name, and is nearly framed for an act that she played no role in; someone has her by the neck, and there are growing concerns as why, if it is Lewis after all, his intentions are malicious.
Maureen will eventually get some of the answers she’s looking for, as will the viewer, though there are plenty of doors left open. “Lewis, is it you?” she asks, when she’s sure she’s ready to close the door. Is Maureen visited? Is she being watched - if so, by whom, and to what end? If not, what will it take for her to convince herself that this chapter is closed? Lara, surely equally heartbroken, has managed to move on; what prevents Maureen from doing the same?
Personal Shopper is one hundred minutes positively littered with bizarre and, frankly, hilarious quips (“It’s extremely difficult to find a portal into the spiritual world. It’s just the way it is” / “You just need to avoid intense physical efforts, like Lewis did - he built cabinets” / “He cares deeply about gorillas”) and scenes flow as if they’ve been cut and pasted from decades of movie-making history. Assayas provides no real indication as to where the inspiration for the messy, eccentric, thrilling storytelling comes from. Some movies are really good; some movies are right terrible. Personal Shopping manages to be both, and quite a bit more, at once.
Jeff Schwartz
2/13/2019