Personal Shopper. Directed by Olivier Assayas. Starring Kristen Stewart. Rating: 5 (out of 10)
Is there any working actress more polarizing than Kristen Stewart? There is no middle ground of opinion on the acting chops of the 26-year-old, who inspires passionate debate among movie-goers worthy of a cable news panel.
Depending on which side of the fence you’re on, Stewart is bland or subtle, artless or a physical genius.
She made an improbable escape from the confines of the teen Twilight franchise. She was one of the best things about set-in-the-‘80s rom-com-drama Adventureland, and worked steadily in art-house films like The Runaways,
On The Road and Equals. And in 2015 Stewart became the first American woman to win the prestigious Cesar award, France’s Oscar equivalent.
She won for Olivier Assayas’ The Clouds of Sils Maria, in which she played the personal assistant to an actress (Juliette Binoche) chasing the spotlight. Perhaps she should’ve taken a more dissimilar path for her next outing, worked with a different director; in Assayas’ latest, his star emits little of the litheness displayed in her last performance and all the awkwardness of her recent SNL hosting gig.
Stewart is Maureen, an American working in Paris as a personal shopper to a high-profile celebrity named Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten). Scenes of her work life show Maureen glumly travelling from couture houses in Paris and London, a less frenetic (or cheery) version of The Devil Wears Prada. A boyfriend in Muscat wishes she’d chuck her job and join him, while we wish we had their modern-day-jet-setting lives.
But Maureen has reason to move catatonically through her daily routine: she’s mourning the death of Lewis, her twin brother. The siblings made a promise that whomever died first would send a signal that they had made it to some sort of afterlife, and Maureen can’t leave Paris until she hears from him.
Every clunk on an old door and window, every drip of a faucet and creak of stairs presages supernatural contact. Spooky signs accumulate, though they may not all be from Lewis.
There are intellectual asides about the abstract art of sometime-occultist Hilma af Klint, and lessons about Victor Hugo’s table-tapping conversations with the dead, not to mention a little bit of computer-generated ectoplasm thrown in for good measure.
Assayas also wrote the screenplay and seems uncertain which way to turn with this one, or perhaps he added a cardiologist’s visit (Maureen is warned to avoid “extreme emotions”) and a murder subplot to keep us on our toes.
Either way, the director sacrifices some of the freshness of his ghost story with overlong periods of Maureen texting a malevolent someone on her smartphone, while Stewart’s determined twitches, coughs and nervous hand gestures distract us from, rather than add to, the film’s core theme of crippling grief.
On the plus side, Stewart has a litheness to her that is perfectly suited to the role: she slips in and out of borrowed rooms and clothing easily but with a self-consciousness that only enhances the voyeuristic aspects of the film.
The discrete parts of Personal Shopper are less limber, making Stewart – virtually alone onscreen – responsible for bringing the pieces together. It proves too big a task.
