Olivier Assayas (2016)
Maureen is an old-fashioned-sounding name for a twenty-something American of today. The protagonist of Olivier Assayas’s new film is out of fashion too in searching for a sign from her recently deceased twin brother Lewis that he’s still around. Maureen’s line of work, on the other hand, is very much de nos jours: she’s a personal shopper for a Paris-based celebrity. That she spends her days on earth shopping – shopping for someone else at that – was, for me, a sufficient explanation of Maureen’s powerful need to believe in life after death, even if her job is the definition of soul-destroying. To be fair to her, she’s working for rich bitch Kyra only in order to pay the rent, and in Paris only because Lewis resided there at the time of his death. The grieving Maureen thinks that hanging out in the house where her brother died provides the best chance of a post-mortem visitation from him.
When she talks about the hereafter, Assayas’s heroine tends to be mumblingly equivocal. Asked if she believes in an afterlife, she replies, ‘You could call it that, or a million other things …’ But words also fail her in the sense that supernatural vocabulary is limited and, for obvious reasons, hasn’t moved with the times – so that Maureen still resorts to wittering about ‘presences’ and so forth. Still, her lukewarm tone functions as a kind of sop to the overwhelmingly sceptical art-house audiences that will buy tickets to see this film – so too does the fact that Maureen the medium is played by the bang-up-to-date Kristen Stewart: anyone less Madame Arcati-like would be hard to imagine. These concessions to modern tastes are one of the factors that make Personal Shopper such a listless movie. The cinematic vocabulary of supernaturalism, as rendered by Olivier Assayas, doesn’t seem to have evolved in recent years any more than the verbal one: the film features ectoplasmic apparitions, inexplicably shattering glass, swinging doors (you start wondering how many ‘signs’ Maureen requires in order to be convinced that Lewis is making contact). These paraphernalia are distinctive here only because they feel drained of the spooky gusto they would once have had in a screen ghost story.
At one point, Lewis’s widow Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz), who also believes in a spirit realm, tells Maureen about ‘Victor Hugo à Jersey’, a ‘tacky’ TV movie from the 1960s about the séances the writer conducted during his time on the Channel Islands. Assayas creates a scene from ‘Victor Hugo à Jersey’ for Maureen to watch on YouTube: it says a lot that this invented film-within-the-film is much more dynamic than most of the other scenes in Personal Shopper. Assayas’s smooth dispassion, perhaps inadvertently, reinforces the viewer’s assumption that what Maureen is experiencing isn’t actually happening but is all-in-her-mind: though since she’s neither fascinating nor sympathetic it’s hard to care one way or the other. Although her style of acting gives the character a bit of surface realness, I found Kristen Stewart less interesting to watch in this lead role than in her recent supporting parts in Still Alice, Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria and Certain Women. Just a few days after seeing Personal Shopper, I can barely remember anyone else in the sizeable cast, except for Sigrid Bouaziz.
The set-up – a person paid to be a material girl trying to communicate with the immaterial world – sounds amusing but the collision of the two eventually amounts to very little. The same goes for Maureen’s and Lewis’s twinship, and for her having the same congenital heart condition that killed him. The rebarbative Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten) vetoes Maureen’s trying on the swanky purchases she makes, a rule that proves, not unexpectedly, hard to enforce. As her retail dogsbody succumbs to the forbidden fruit lure of Kyra’s wardrobe, the film drifts towards a different cliché-ridden territory – the servant-mistress identity swap – but this is only for the temporary want of anything else to do. There’s a relatively striking sequence in which automatic sliding doors open and close without any visible presence causing them to do so, though it’s a poor incorporeal entity that can’t pass through closed doors anyway. Not unusually for a film-maker looking to give a ‘contemporary twist’ to a time-honoured movie genre, Assayas makes big use of mobile phones. Maureen receives endless anonymous text messages – their appearance on screen is as dramatically compelling as … well, looking at phone texts. The ‘mystery’ of who’s sending these messages – Lewis, A N Other, Maureen to herself – isn’t solved: the effect isn’t tantalising because lack of resolution is so obviously essential to the whole enterprise of Personal Shopper. It’s just part of the design.
23 March 2017
