Personal Shopper (2017)

Film: Personal Shopper (2017)
Stars: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Nora von Waldstatten
Director: Olivier Assayas
Oscar History: No nominations, though Assayas took Best Director at Cannes.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Two years ago, I enjoyed one of the biggest surprises of 2015 (cinematically) very early on in the year with Clouds of Sils Maria, a beautiful treatise on aging, movie stardom, art, and the roles we play as we move throughout life.  It's a fascinating study, one that was directed by Olivier Assayas and featured as one of its stars Kristen Stewart, who has largely graduated from being the moody girl in Twilight to an actress well-celebrated by critics (she is consistently strong in work like On the Road, Still Alice, and best of all Sils Maria, which should have earned her her first Oscar nomination in my opinion).  When the two of them decided to reunite, I definitely wanted to seek out their picture, but poor timing on my part (and the inevitable "I have no money" tidings of March) reared their head, and so I haven't been able to catch Personal Shopper until this past weekend as I seek out the movies from 2017 I haven't watched yet in hopes of soon creating my year-end awards.  Considering how much I loved Sils Maria, I was interested to see what Assayas would bring out in Stewart with her taking the lead role.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers once again on an assistant, Maureen (Stewart), who is the personal shopper of a celebrity named Kyra (von Waldstatten), whose career doesn't seem to be important, which may be yet another insight by Assayas, who had a lot to say about celebrity in his last picture.  Maureen has recently lost her twin brother Lewis to a heart condition they both share, and as both are mediums who believe in the spiritual world, they had made a promise to each other that whichever died first would try and communicate from beyond the grave to the still living sibling. The movie, thus, sets up a situation where we can't entirely tell if there's a supernatural presence or whether the strange happenings are something that is a manifestation of Stewart's grief over losing her brother.  In many ways the movie borrows from pictures like The Babadook or The Whisperers or L'Attesa, sometimes outwardly showing that the spirit world is alive, but never quite to the definitive point of knowing whether or not Maureen is actually interacting with her brother (or someone else using her grief to communicate from the beyond) or whether she's truly gone mad.

This juxtaposition and ambiguity may have tried some viewers' patience (I think it was one of those booed than cheered situations during the Cannes screenings), but I loved it.  Assayas is a director/writer of big ideas, and while he can't answer them (in the case of knowing definitively whether there's a beyond, no one can), he doesn't shy away from them by giving us concrete answers.  Even the most literal of mysteries, like the man that Maureen is texting with and convincing her to engage in reckless behavior (and then kills her boss), is never explicitly identified, though it's largely implied it's the celebrity's ex-boyfriend Ingo (Eidinger) who in an early scene in the picture makes a job pitch to Maureen.  The film's central themes of grief, sadness, and searching for meaning are felt throughout, and I tended to love it even when it was frustrating.

As for Stewart, this is another success.  While she's hardly a character actor (she is always playing some version of Kristen Stewart...Jessica Chastain she ain't), that's never been a problem for the likes of Cary Grant or Bette Davis, and isn't for Stewart, whose aloof movie star persona works here.  We get her channeling a lot of inner-sexuality in the way she did during points of Sils Maria and On the Road, and the ending scene, where she attempts one last time to communicate with her brother, perhaps realizing that she's started to go mad, is a doozy and well-played.  This doesn't have the stand-offish enigma of her character in Sils Maria, perhaps because none of her costars are remotely as talented as Juliette Binoche, but it's still another success from an actress once written off by the collective film world for being just a scowling girl in love with a vampire.