A recently recovering woman deals with grief and the afterlife, in CG Cinema’s ‘Personal Shopper’. This ethereal and mysterious ghost story stars Kristen Stewart as Maureen, a high-fashion personal shopper to the stars and celebrity community alike, who is also a spiritual medium. Grieving the recent and sudden death of her twin brother, she inhabits his Paris home, determined to make contact with him and resolve the conflict deep within her own heart. ‘Personal Shopper’ is written and directed by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, and is rated R for some adult language, sexuality, nudity and a bloody violent image.
Personal Shopper is one of those kinds of movies that plays to a familiar genre narrative, this time a psychological ghost thriller, but tweeks it full of touches that oppose that of the conventional storytelling to present a different take all together. This is very much a movie that channels the long and tedious road of grief, stimulating audiences in relatability for those of us who have lost someone important in our lives. In that aspect, this film sticks its claws into the audience early, communicating the similarities that we go through in trying to pick the pieces back up and assemble some kind of life. For everyone it’s different, and this particular story speaks to those of us still longing to find a therapeutic solution. Assayas is a director who I’m not particularly fond of, especially after 2015’s Clouds of Sils Maria, which I thought was a pretentious disaster, but for Personal Shopper Assayas has found a simple touch that ignites the flames beneath a cerebral slow-burner like this one, and doesn’t need contrivances or convolution to appeal to both the independent cinema audience and mainstream audiences alike. This is a very difficult film to recommend to my readers, not because it isn’t good, but rather it is anything but the conventionalism from these kind of ghost flicks that you are used to seeing. An artistic touch in an otherwise overcrowded subgenre.
For most of the first act of the film, I was very impressed with what this film managed to do with setting the right mood to depict the cold and damp surroundings of this immense empty mansion that Maureen has been hired to mediate. The sound mixing and editing are so crucial here because it constantly feels like we are one step ahead of her in terms of realization and clarity for the pokes and prods that are moving around her. This is very much a movie that doesn’t dispel in one way or the other if ghosts exist, leaving both sides with fuel for the fire, and even offering some frightening blurred visual apparitions that served as the highest expense in terms of visual pizazz. As far as scene editing goes, the film offers a dual compromise of fading out and quick-cut editing that does somewhat compromise the scene integrities. I felt that quick-cut was perfect for this particular style and look of film, but the fading effect was one that hindered the progression of a couple of scenes by cutting far too early and limiting what last bits of dialogue that we were following before the scene abruptly ends. This is my only problem with the visuals of the film, but it shouldn’t be a big deal unless you’re a visual purist like myself.
As for the story, there’s so much that I want to say but can’t because of spoilers, so I will do my best to navigate through the emotional roller-coaster that the movie took me on. As I mentioned before, this isn’t the movie to expect thrills and jump scares, this is very much a slow-paced sizzler that depicts the human confrontation with death and how hollow that process can leave us. There are what I like to call two different narratives going on within the film; reality and desire, and those two are integral parts to Maureen’s psyche in how she embraces the unbelievable around her. During the film, I found myself dreading the latter, but with an ending as brilliantly constructed as this one, everything suddenly comes into focus and manages to achieve one of those rare feats of answering every logic-bending question that I had with a single move. With those two aspects in story, one clearly outweighs the other, and once the big reveal happens, if you’re like me you will find yourself grinning from ear-to-ear with the fact that this movie didn’t take the cliche way out in wrapping up its familiar steps that other films have touched on.
The second act is definitely the weakness of the script, as it’s during this time when we get some temporary tone shifts that are unnecessary to the progression. More particularly, there are a couple scenes of forced humor that not only completely miss their targets, but also feel like a desperate attempt to appeal to moviegoers to keep them moving through some rough pacing. As I said, this is really only during the second act, but the transition from one narrative to the other between the tighter acts, does make the middle portion noticeably shaky when compared to a riveting beginning and end.
Kristen Stewart where have you been all this time? For the record, I’m not someone who despises Stewart’s acting, nor find her insufferable. Stewart (Like any actor) just needs the right kind of tone and script to appeal to her personality, a feat that she has had limited success with in her early career. Stewart here is breathtaking, channeling an exterior of boiling despair that cripples her the closer that she gets to emotional clarity. What is so clever about Maureen’s character is this aspect of being a personal shopper for a rich model, yet possessing a supernatural gift, and how the two play into the coming out of the shell for Kristen as an actress, and yet Maureen as a character. This is quite a transition from start to finish in this movie, and Stewart is happy to oblige with arguably her most versatile performance to date. There are other actors and actresses in the film, but this is very much a one woman show because of this compass of emotional vulnerability that never points in just a single direction.
It’s easy to buy a lot of what Personal Shopper is selling, and a majority of that is because of an arresting performance by Stewart, as well as precision storytelling that constantly keeps the audience guessing. Olivier Assayas’s newest is a spellbinding deconstruction on the perplexing properties of grief, and how sometimes saying goodbye takes years. It’s scary without needing jumps or jigs, and that’s because the strongest fear is that of the battle we constantly engage with on the inside.
7/10