Personal Shopper (2016)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Maureen, mid-20s, is a personal shopper for a media celebrity. The job pays for her stay in Paris, a city she refuses to leave until she makes contact with her twin brother who previously died there. Her life becomes more complicated when a mysterious person contacts her via text message.
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What critics say influenced Personal Shopper
Assayas echoes Stanley Kubrick (those hotels) and Michael Haneke (death’s mesmeric pull) but the film-makers whose ghosts most haunt this film are Hitchcock, always a dab hand at torturing his heroines, and Nicholas Roeg at his finest – particularly Bad Timing and Don’t Look Now .
Following her 2015 Cesar win for her performance in his “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Kristen Stewart reunites with French auteur Olivier Assayas for “Personal Shopper,” a modern-day ghost story recalling such classy and often deliberately ambiguous examples of the genre as “Don’t Look Now” (1973) and “The Haunting” (1963).
Assayas echoes Stanley Kubrick (those hotels) and Michael Haneke (death’s mesmeric pull) but the film-makers whose ghosts most haunt this film are Hitchcock, always a dab hand at torturing his heroines, and Nicholas Roeg at his finest – particularly Bad Timing and Don’t Look Now .
French director Olivier Assayas (“ Clouds of Sils Maria ,” “ Something in the Air ”) scored the competition’s first big bad round of booing with his fizzled thriller “Personal Shopper.”
Kristen Stewart reteams with her 'Clouds of Sils Maria' director Olivier Assayas for a Paris-set ghost story.
But the best I can do is insist that it’s a must-see for anyone who wonders what it might look like if a cerebral French art-film director tried to make The Conjuring 3. Kristen Stewart gave the best performance of her career in Assayas’ last film, Clouds Of Sils Maria , playing a movie star’s personal assistant; here, she’s front and center as a similar gofer, Maureen, whose job involves selecting the wardrobe and generally running errands for a vacuous, unspecified celebrity (Nora Von Waldstätten).
The wildly unconventional study of a young American woman going through a spiritual crisis — in more ways than one — this reunion between Kristen Stewart and the director who gave her one of her best-ever roles in 2014’s “Clouds of Sils Maria” is a broken, but never boring mix of spine-tingling horror story, dreary workplace drama and elliptical identity search, likely to go down as one of the most divisive films of Stewart’s career.
Stewart shines in Olivier Assayas's improbable mash-up of 'Clouds of Sils Maria' and 'The Conjuring.'
And director Olivier Assayas (who directed Stewart in the wonderful Clouds of Sils Maria) just keeps coming back to those texts.
“Personal Shopper” bears about as much in common with any other ghost movie you may have seen as the director’s now-20-year-old “Irma Vep” does classic vampire movies (which was sort of the point, centering on a remake of silent classic “Les Vampires”).
Assayas has always worked at a consistently high level of excellence, but “Personal Shopper” is his most vital film in years, at times recalling the verve of his 1996 breakthrough “ Irma Vep ” (whose star, Maggie Cheung, Stewart evokes whenever she gets on a motorcycle).
As with the same director’s Irma Vep, Personal Shopper adds unexpected cultural flavours (a dramatised Victor Hugo seance, Klimt abstracts) to its generic underpinnings.
Kent Jones once wrote that his movies, including "Irma Vep" and "Carlos," present “the blur of existence.”
Kristen Stewart, who plays Maureen, has something in common with other stars of Mr. Assayas’s films, notably Maggie Cheung in “Irma Vep” and “Clean” — a quality of self-enclosed detachment that becomes its own peculiar form of intensity.
I’d love to report that Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (Grade: B-), which set off a chorus of disapproval at its press screening last night, is a misunderstood masterpiece—or even that it’s as strong as Assayas’ hugely divisive techno-thriller Demonlover , which got booed here back in 2002 (my very first time at Cannes).
Assayas es un realizador estimable, pero a veces le da por ponerse conceptual (ese fue el caso de su anterior tropezón en Cannes, Demonlover, de 2002).
The French director behind Carlos and Demonlover has described his latest as a “collage,” but in truth, it’s a pile of scraps that never quite coheres.
Here, as in the manic “Demonlover” (2002), Assayas is onto something—the uncontainable means by which modern communications may be binding us together not as one friend to another but as extortioner to victim, predator to prey, or dead to quick.
The premise is ludicrous, but not unexpected from Assayas, a restlessly inventive filmmaker whose sinister global thrillers Demonlover (2002) and Boarding Gate (2007) likewise pivot on absurd plot points to plumb 21st-century malaise and disorder.
To watch a triple bill of “Irma Vep,” “Demonlover” and “Summer Hours,” to name three of his more memorable works, is to embark on a six-hour journey from the playful to the sublime by way of the completely deranged.
Here she follows in the footsteps of Maggie Cheung and Asia Argento, actors whose exceptional central performances prevented fundamentally flawed films by Assayas – Clean and Boarding Gate, respectively – from foundering altogether.
Kristen Stewart, who plays Maureen, has something in common with other stars of Mr. Assayas’s films, notably Maggie Cheung in “Irma Vep” and “Clean” — a quality of self-enclosed detachment that becomes its own peculiar form of intensity.
(Those earlier films, plus the third title of what’s known as the director’s “International Trilogy,” the jet-setting maternal melodrama Clean, from 2004, screen at Metrograph on March 11.) Yet the most salient predecessor to Personal Shopper might be Irma Vep (1996), Assayas’s affectionate, frantic metamovie in which Maggie Cheung plays a version of herself: a luminary of Hong Kong action pictures who arrives in Paris to star in a bedeviled remake of Les Vampires, Louis Feuillade’s famed 1915 silent serial.
Here she follows in the footsteps of Maggie Cheung and Asia Argento, actors whose exceptional central performances prevented fundamentally flawed films by Assayas – Clean and Boarding Gate, respectively – from foundering altogether.
“Personal Shopper” is as much a horror movie (or a fashion movie) as “demonlover” and “Boarding Gate” were thrillers.
The premise is ludicrous, but not unexpected from Assayas, a restlessly inventive filmmaker whose sinister global thrillers Demonlover (2002) and Boarding Gate (2007) likewise pivot on absurd plot points to plumb 21st-century malaise and disorder.
Thematically this is Olivier Assayas's darkest feature since Boarding Gate (2007), though it's much better, owing largely to Kristen Stewart's mesmeric performance as a young Parisian who works as personal shopper to a jet-set model and, in her spare time, communicates with the dead.
This is most clearly born out in 2008's Summer Hours , where family heirlooms seem to contain some essence of their past owners.
But while Personal Shopper isn’t quite up to the level of Assayas’ greatest—this is no Summer Hours or Carlos—it makes far more sense in the execution than it does in the explanation.
Written and directed by cinema-besotted Assayas (“Irma Vep,” “Summer Hours”), “Personal Shopper” tells the story of Maureen Cartwright (Stewart), a young American working as an assistant to a diva socialite-philanthropist named Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten) in Paris.
The new film by Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria, Summer Hours) follows Maureen (Kristen Stewart), who works in Paris as the eponymous personal shopper for an egocentric A-list actress.
To watch a triple bill of “Irma Vep,” “Demonlover” and “Summer Hours,” to name three of his more memorable works, is to embark on a six-hour journey from the playful to the sublime by way of the completely deranged.
Assayas, whose previous credits include “Irma Vep,” “Summer Hours” and “Clouds of Sils Maria,” continues to explore issues of death and mortality, and depict foreigners in Paris, in this English-language drama featuring “Clouds” costar Kristen Stewart.
Following her 2015 Cesar win for her performance in his “Clouds of Sils Maria,” Kristen Stewart reunites with French auteur Olivier Assayas for “Personal Shopper,” a modern-day ghost story recalling such classy and often deliberately ambiguous examples of the genre as “Don’t Look Now” (1973) and “The Haunting” (1963).
(To describe the special effects further would be a betrayal of the film, but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything so unnerving since Robert Wise’s The Haunting .)
This odd little film reminded me of Val Lewton’s 1943 ghost tale “The Seventh Victim,” which is also about a young woman searching for a lost sibling.
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In some ways, Personal Shopper feels like a Gallic cineaste’s attempt to recapture some of the freewheeling, kooky genre-drama of a 1980s Brian De Palma movie – and there’s more than an echo of Body Double here – but what’s missing is the latter’s style and verve.
The mirrored sequins on a Chanel dress cast reflections that flit across the walls like mischievous wraiths, and you may even detect a hint of “Harvey” (1950)—in which Jimmy Stewart was best friends with an invisible rabbit—as the doors of a hotel elevator open and close to let through a nonexistent guest.
Suddenly she has an “unknown caller,” contacting her via texts on her smartphone, an aggressive and vexing presence not unlike the mocking telephone psycho from Scream .
Perhaps part of Maureen even wishes she was Kyra and that is what leads to the De Palma-inspired secret stalker, who acts like a refugee from Scream and urges Maureen to give in to her secret desires.
Soon, Maureen is taking orders from the mysterious presence on the other end of her cell phone, who starts to feed her lines not that far from those of the postmodern serial killer in “Scream.”
One subplot, involving a series of increasingly threatening text messages from an unknown figure who seems to know everything about Maureen, even updates the slasher genre, modernizing the wry but sinister phone calls from Scream for the smartphone era.
You have to reach back to “Poltergeist” (1982), to the image of a little girl sitting in front of a fuzzy TV and staring at the flashes of spectral visitation, to find something as provoking, and as creepily close to home, as the phone sequences in “Personal Shopper.”
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But the texts — of which “no desire if not forbidden” and “what you find unsettling is fear” are just a couple of wha? examples — become progressively more aggressive and demanding (shades of “Vertigo” at one point) and then turn out to be part of a different sinister plot that leads to a bloody murder and a potential frame-up.
She could quit, though Assayas comes up with a far more surprising way to liberate Maureen of her employment duties, whisking her away to faraway Oman, for a scene that’s as disembodied from the rest of the film as the Iraq-set opening of “The Exorcist” feels from all the reality-grounded horror that follows.