Personal Shopper | Olivier Assayas | March 10, 2017
Personal Shopper is a confused film. Director and writer Olivier Assayas seems to have stitched three separate films into one sometimes perplexing and frustrating mess. The film is part ghost story, erotic thriller, and character drama. The three types of stories here just never blend together to form a cohesive whole, leaving me wondering what exactly Assayas was trying to accomplish. There are some films that require further viewing, analysis, and research on what the director was going for. Personal Shopper doesn’t feel like one of those films, even though it seemingly tries to be.
Kristen Stewart stars as Maureen, a young woman living and working as a personal shopper in Paris. She comes to Paris after her brother dies from a fatal heart condition, which she now also has as well. Her brother, Lewis, was a medium and could communicate with the dead. Maureen also shares this gift, and spends the first twenty minutes of the film attempting to contact Lewis at his former home where he died. There are bumps in the night, scratches on the walls, and even spectral figures that appear. Maureen spends her days working for a high maintenance model that strangely only appears once in the entire film. On a train trip to London to purchase more high end clothing, Maureen begins to receive mysterious texts from an unknown source. These texts are laid out and focused on so much, to the point where it’s trying to be a mystery and make you question what is really happening. It tries to put you in the mindset of Kristen Stewart’s character, but the “mystery” is so obvious that I couldn’t believe the film was focusing so much time on it.
There are back and forth dialogues with characters that feel very unnatural and awkward. Kristen Stewart does her best with the script she was given, but there were many guffaws from viewers around me after Maureen starts seriously discussing portals to the spirit world. There were many rough edits in this film as well. Scenes would fade out in jarring fashion, taking me out of the film frequently. Maybe this was intentional? I honestly don’t know. In the end, the film is really about Maureen’s unhappiness with her life and her jealously towards the industry she now currently works in. That could be an interesting character study, if done right. Personal Shopper tries to be about overcoming fear and self doubt, but while also including a ghost story and murder mystery thrown in as well. It just doesn’t work, and the resolution to the film is one of the more anti-climactic ones I’ve seen in a long time.
Visually, the film looks great. The Paris setting, and the fashion world boutiques are nice too look at, but when the characters begin to speak, it all felt forced and I was immediately taken out of the film again. One in particular towards the end has Kristen Stewart talking to the new boyfriend of her brother’s widow. Their discussion about death and the afterlife is spoken as being profound, but there are many other films about death that have said the same thing much more eloquently. This film was booed at Cannes, and unfortunately after seeing it, I can kind of see why (although outright booing seems a tad extreme). It just never really adds up to anything worth remembering. If ghosts could shrug …
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