Personal Shopper (2017)

Personal Shopper (2017)

IMDB Rating 6.7/10 (as on 24.03.2017)

Revolves around a ghost story that takes place in the fashion underworld of Paris.

Director: Olivier Assayas

Writers: Olivier Assayas (dialogue), Olivier Assayas (screenplay)

Stars: Kristen Stewart, Lars Eidinger, Sigrid Bouaziz

R | 1h 45min | Drama, Mystery, Thriller

 IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★★★★  

 Kristen Stewart is truly captivating

Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is stylish, mysterious and very strange. It is a ghost story and suspense thriller, yet also a sympathetically realist portrait of numbed quarterlife loneliness, and it’s all held together by a really outstanding performance from Kristen Stewart who, in her unforced and unaffected normality, gives us a way into the drama, with all its natural and supernatural happenings. Stewart is eligible for next year’s Oscars, but acting like this hardly ever gets prizes. She makes it all look easy.

I’ve seen Personal Shopper a second time, since it blew everyone at Cannes away last year, and another viewing redoubled its shivery fear, its uncanny, elegant ambiguity and also its poignancy. Stewart gives new force to that terrible old cliche: the old soul. She is in her mid-20s but has accumulated a lifetime of sadness. There are dark circles under her eyes, and Assayas’s camera often gets in close enough to show a rash of tiny spots at the corner of her mouth. Her character has nothing like the provocative fragility of glamour; she lopes around in jeans and a sweater from the top of which white iPhone earbuds emerge. Her naked body is periodically revealed in a context candidly free of sexuality. Yet she happens to look sensational in couture.

There are some classic thriller moments, and Hitchcock himself might have admired the masterly sequence in which a row of her pursuer’s threatening stacked-up texts show up on her just-switched-on phone. Maureen is in some ways a next-gen version of Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or perhaps the haunted Nicole Kidman in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth. But actually, in her non-glam ordinariness, she is more like Daniel Auteuil in Michael Haneke’s stalker nightmare Hidden: Personal Shopper has something of that drama’s structural enigma.

It could be that Maureen is really the stalker, never able to leave the dead alone, provoking them, making them unhappy. But it doesn’t make any difference to her own unhappiness. Opinions may divide as to the movie’s coda, which transports us from Paris to Oman and arguably duplicates the effect of the previous scene. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled.

 Read full review at The guardian

Movie Rating ★★★★★  

Kristen Stewart transfixes in a nerve-jangling ghost mystery

A woman runs from a killer and hides.” That’s the reason given by Maureen (Kristen Stewart), the title character of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, when an anonymous texter asks her why horror films scare her. And as her fingers flit across the screen of her iPhone, she seems to get more scared with every tap.

For convenience’s sake, you could call Personal Shopper a ghost story – and there really are ghosts in it; billowing ectoplasmic forms in the style of Victorian spirit photography, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen so uncannily represented in cinema before. But it’s less a scary movie than a film about fear – the way it finds our weak spots then gnaws away at them, until a rational worry decomposes into formless dread.

Personal Shopper unnerves you with nothing. Scenes end with civilised fade-to-blacks, and in context they’re more disturbing than a smash-cut. And that extraordinary text message sequence – which spans the film’s entire second act (of four) – is interrupted by nothing more jolting than the soft wehh, wehh of Maureen’s phone, which is set to vibrate. It’s as nerve-jangling as the bit in Hitchcock’s Sabotage with the time bomb on the bus.

The camera fixates on Stewart throughout. You can hardly blame it. This is the Twilight star turned international indie cinema champion’s second collaboration with Assayas after 2015’s Clouds of Sils Maria, in which she played another PA – but while she shared that film with Juliette Binoche, a longstanding screen icon, here she’s flying solo, and is spellbinding throughout.

At first, Maureen almost seems like a parody of a Stewart character: she’s sullen, downbeat, hesitant, and shuffles around in big, drab jumpers. When her doctor advises her to “avoid intense physical effort and extreme emotions,” it’s hard to resist a smirk.

But it soon becomes clear that pinning Maureen down will be tricky. As a person she seems to be overwhelmingly defined by the people around her – Lewis, Kyra (whom we only meet once), Lewis’s ex-girlfriend (Sigrid Bouaziz), Kyra’s current lover (Lars Eidinger) – but for much of the film she’s either alone, on the move, or interacting with strangers. It’s a high-risk, demanding part that requires a subtle, spontaneous-seeming, ever-shifting interplay of intensity and blankness, and Stewart proves to be ideal.

Maureen is highly conscious of her body, especially when it’s clad in harness tops and lingerie that "aren’t her", and which she could never afford. The film’s immediately iconic big dress-up scene, in which Maureen carries and caresses herself with a previously unseen confidence, has the same prowling ambience as the haunted house scenes – and it’s also wildly erotic, even soundtracked with a Marlene Dietrich cabaret number for that authentic Weimar kink.

But who’s getting under Maureen’s skin? Are we watching a possession, or just self-possession, take hold? Well, that’s Personal Shopper's underlying puzzle, and if it volunteered an easy answer, you'd feel cheated. The film is a creepy, sexy luxury – and a mesmerising study of the uneasy human pact between flesh and spirit.

 Read full review at Telegraph

 Kristen Stewart reteams with her 'Clouds of Sils Maria' director Olivier Assayas for a Paris-set ghost story.

A sort-of ghost story about a young American in Paris who half-believes she’s in contact with her late twin brother, this aggravatingly empty would-be suspense piece puts all its trust in its star to save the day, but even this compulsively watchable performer can’t elevate such a vapid, undeveloped screenplay. Perhaps some American distributor will decide that Stewart’s name connected to an R-rated would-be scarefest might be promotable as a quick Halloween cash-in, but theaters would quickly empty when word gets around.

As with any number of Hollywood and British horror quickies of an earlier era, all the film is really about is whether or not the protagonist is going to succumb to the belief that an inhabitant of the spirit world is in a position to make contact with humans who still walk the earth. As with most such stories, this one has a much more prosaic resolution to its mystery.

Even Stewart’s usual screen magic isn’t enough to make Personal Shopper worth seeing; her character is tense, uncertain and not particularly articulate most of the time and is operating largely in a vacuum. The majority of the other characters are unappealing and/or creepy, and the dialogue lacks spark.

Read full review at Hollywood reporter

 

Movie Rating ★★★✭☆  

  Kristen Stewart embodies woman haunted by grief

No matter what sort of movie you're expecting from "Personal Shopper," you'll get it. You'll also contend with three others, and then the movie you first expected will turn inside out.

So all that awaits the receptive viewer, along with a dangling modifier of an ending guaranteed to satisfy virtually no one. Even so, this is one of the most intriguing pictures of the year, a genre-hopper of unusual gravity. It's also the latest proof that Kristen Stewart has the goods for a long-haul acting career, with all sorts of directors, playing all sorts of characters.

"Personal Shopper" comes from writer-director Olivier Assayas, based in France, who worked previously with Stewart on "Clouds of Sils Maria" three years ago. There she played a restless American assistant to an internationally famous actress (Juliette Binoche). Their increasingly fraught and emotionally loaded relationship led to a scene in the mountains where the Stewart character took her leave, suddenly and finally, in a cloud of mystery recalling Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Avventura" and a hint of a ghost story.

Movies make frequent functional use in narrative terms of texting conversations, but "Personal Shopper" takes it to another level entirely. The nervous rhythm of these scenes is beautifully controlled, and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux makes every interior and exterior image a thing of unforced beauty. In many ways this is a tale of a young woman's agitated grief, pure and simple, and Stewart's wonderful and wholly persuasive as that woman. At times, "Personal Shopper" is quite plain in what it's showing us; Lewis' spirit (or some other spirit) manifests itself by way of floating glassware and doors opening and closing on their own, as if Assayas were adapting a Paris-set revival of "Harvey." Other elements are glanced upon or elided. I suspect Assayas could have gotten away with his ending with just a slight adjustment in emphasis; as is, it's abrupt enough to betray a hint of insecurity.

Still: I was grateful for the gentle, watchful discombobulation. The movie barely hangs together, but there's a kind of magic in that word "barely" when you're in that movie's thrall. At one point Maureen's doctor advises her to avoid "intense physical efforts and extreme emotions." Assayas is an artist with a natural aversion to extreme emotions, but the feeling in "Personal Shopper," fleeting yet distinct, gives Stewart everything she needs as an actress.

Read full review at Chicago tribune

Movie Rating ★★★★★  

Kristen Stewart shines in supernatural thriller ‘Personal Shopper’

Actress Kristen Stewart may forever be associated with the popular “Twilight” franchise, movies that center on the growing pains of vampires and werewolves. Lately, however, she has shone in more serious fare from such directors as Woody Allen (“Cafe Society”) and Kelly Reichardt (“Certain Women”). With her latest film, French director Olivier Assayas’s “Personal Shopper,” Stewart returns to the kind of supernatural themes that made her a star at the multiplex — only this time it’s in a stylish, highly entertaining art-house thriller.

Throughout the film, we hear Maureen’s footsteps reverberate in empty spaces — the ghostly echo of her own very modern sense of alienation.

According to Stewart, the idea for “Personal Shopper” grew out of a conversation in “Clouds of Sils Maria,” her previous film with Assayas, in which Stewart also played a personal assistant (to a veteran actress played by Juliette Binoche). As if defending the movies that made Stewart a star, her “Sils Maria” character asserts that there can be as much truth in genre films — science fiction and fantasy, for example — as there is in so-called serious movies.

On one level, Maureen feels like a continuation of that character, except that here, the personal assistant role anchors a highly effective genre film, not a self-referential drama. And yet, with its layers of allusions and deep meaning, this apparent horror movie is no less intelligent or cerebral than the earlier film.

Assayas has always worked at a consistently high level of excellence, but “Personal Shopper” is his most vital film in years, at times recalling the verve of his 1996 breakthrough “Irma Vep” (whose star, Maggie Cheung, Stewart evokes whenever she gets on a motorcycle). But you don’t need to be familiar with Assayas’s previous work to enjoy “Personal Shopper.” It works in two realms: as an engrossing ghost story and a drama that addresses profound matters of life and death.

Read full review at Washington Post

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆  

 Olivier Aassyas raised eyebrows recently when he described Kristen Stewart, who plays the lead in Personal Shopper, as the “best actress of her generation”. That may be over-egging it absurdly but he draws a soulful, richly layered performance from the Twilight star.

Like Krzysztof Kieslowski with Juliette Binoche and Irene Jacob in Three Colours Blue and The Double Life Of Veronqiue, Assayas constructs the film around his star. Stewart appears in almost every scene, often alone. The director wants to register every tiny flicker in her emotions. She plays Maureen, a young woman living in Paris and working as a “personal shopper” for some brattish celebrity.

There are times when Personal Shopper seems to be shaping up as a contemporary equivalent to a 19th-century ghost story, complete with spirits spewing ectoplasm, seances, and objects smashing or falling mysteriously off the sideboard. Assayas, though, is too cool and self-conscious a director to use horror conventions without a little distancing irony. Stewart’s character herself remains strangely detached, even at the most morbid moments.

There are some jarring but intriguing clashes in tone and storytelling style. One moment, we’ll be in a Euro trash world of designer clothes and Cartier jewellery and the next we’ll be watching a creaky old movie in which Victor Hugo holds a séance on the isle of Jersey. In its glossier moments, the film has the look of a Condé Nast Traveller photo spread. However, there are also painfully raw scenes in which Maureen’s grief and yearning for her brother are very obvious.

Assayas won the Best Director award at Cannes for Personal Shopper. You can understand why. There are many bravura moments along the way. In particular, during a sequence that takes Maureen on the EuroStar to London, the director uses iPhones and text messages to crank up the tension with an ingenuity that Alfred Hitchcock himself would surely have admired.

Assayas also frequently manages to startle us, whether with scenes of Stewart dressing in her employer’s luxury clothes and masturbating or in the moments in which it veers off into bloody crime story territory.  This is a movie in which brilliance and banality sit side-by-side but one in which Stewart always shines.

 Read full review at Independent

People often say that beautiful dresses are invisible, mysterious, or they defy gravity; Personal Shopper, a film about a stylist, is an extraordinary piece of gossamer, held together by almost nothing.

Take the lead character, Maureen. Her name doesn’t fit. The actress who plays her, Kristen Stewart, doesn’t fit either. She wears the same ratty jumper for nearly all her scenes. She seems to be doing something that could probably be described as styling her boss, a spoilt “monster” socialite named Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten). But one thing she isn’t doing is personal shopping. Personal shopping is an in-store service offered by big department stores, and Maureen doesn’t seem to be attached to anything. She doesn’t even seem to be attached to herself. Nothing really makes sense, not Maureen, not Kyra — one of the first socialites I’ve ever come across who doesn’t like shopping — nor even the title of the film. So what we have here is a beautifully constructed series of dead ends, a complex mystery.

Because if its director, Olivier Assayas, has one strength, it is conjuring a piece of couture out of the most awkward materials. Principal among these silks is the stiff, pocket-hunched, awkward and, so far, in spite of 20 years in the industry, still underconfident Stewart. Her previous work with Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria, was a sort of dry (and much less successful) run for this film, showing Stewart as a personal assistant. (What’s next? Personal Organiser?)

In having almost no signature style himself, apart from a liquid camera and a dark and brackish palette, Assayas builds up a curious mishmash of ideas and influences around Stewart. And somehow it all comes together. Not because of his lead actress, but, and this is another strange thing, in spite of her. Stewart is not believable or accomplished in any capacity. She seems to have taken the role so she can ride a moped in a leather jacket and smoke Gitanes, as if she needs to tick off the French module in her “becoming a great actress” apprenticeship.

She appears to have made no progress since Twilight, remaining a querulous, one-dimensional paradigm of emo dishevelment, except when she strips down to her G-string in order to slip into one of her boss’s sparkling dresses, shimmying out of her jeans into bra, chiffon, spangles, spike heels, reclining in a see-through dress to pleasure herself in her boss’s bed.

Stewart dutifully denudes, as if this is the second part of the “becoming a great actress” module. The overall feeling is one of a delicious sort of collusion between us and Assayas in admiration of an actress who, if not great at acting, is a rook-eyed, pale-faced, just-drenched stick of sex. If you don’t leave the cinema a total bed-biting lesbian, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

Read full review at The times

Kristen Stewart Sets Personal Shopper Ablaze

Young actors still figuring out their craft, and themselves, always want to work with seasoned directors, for obvious reasons. But those sorts of spring-autumn pairings often benefit filmmakers as much as they do performers. Personal Shopper is the second film from ace French director Olivier Assayas to feature Kristen Stewart: She won a Cesar for her role in his last picture, The Clouds of Sils Maria, where she played the perceptive, long-suffering personal assistant to a demanding actress (played by Juliette Binoche).

The Assayas-Stewart partnership blossoms further with Personal Shopper, a shivery, slow-building story about grief, ghosts and beautiful, expensive clothes.

Personal Shopper is a strange and beautifully made film, and both star and director are clearly energized by their dual mission. This is unlike any other Assayas film, though if you know and love his work, you’ll spot familiar touches: Stewart, in a helmet and sumptuously worn-in leather aviator’s jacket, tooling around Paris on a motorbike, is an image borrowed from Assayas’s early masterpiece Irma Vep—though it’s an homage not to himself, but to the idea of youthful restlessness.Stewart is both laid back and ablaze here. Her eyes can be as alert as a tiger’s, but more often they seem to assay the world with the cool, lazy blink of a lizard. She moves with the grace of a boy who both plays baseball and takes ballet. At one point, in an act of sultry defiance, Maureen secretly tries on one of her boss’s costly dresses, trussing her tomboy-flapper figure in a faux-bondagey harness that’s later draped with a floating layer of black chiffon. Soft and strong, she’s garçon and femme, boy and woman, at once. You wouldn’t call her gamine—that’s too cute, too in-between, and Stewart is definitive. She knows exactly who she is: Her allure is that she keeps us guessing.

 Read full review at Time

Kristen Stewart Is Entrancing as a Haunted ‘Personal Shopper’

Like many other characters in the films of Olivier Assayas, Maureen, a young American woman living in France, belongs to a relatively privileged slice of the international nomad class. The old-fashioned term “jet set,” with its connotations of glamorous indolence, doesn’t quite fit. Mr. Assayas’s world is populated by figures in perpetual transit: actors, corporate executives, terrorists. Their identities have been dissolved by perpetual displacement. We remember their faces (which are often the faces of movie stars), even if we’re not quite sure who they are.

Kristen Stewart, who plays Maureen, has something in common with other stars of Mr. Assayas’s films, notably Maggie Cheung in “Irma Vep” and “Clean” — a quality of self-enclosed detachment that becomes its own peculiar form of intensity. She possesses an uncanny ability to turn her natural charisma into diffidence. You can’t take your eyes off her, even as she seems to be making every effort to deflect your attention, to obscure her radiance, to disappear onscreen.

Some viewers may balk at Mr. Assayas’s supernatural literalism. Surely he’s too subtle and cerebral a filmmaker for things that go bump in the night. But the hauntedness of contemporary existence — the sense that ordinary experiences of work, sex and travel unfold within invisible networks in response to unseen forces — is a theme he often revisits. His camera moves stealthily, hovering at shoulder level like a stalker or a spy, silently observing people who believe themselves to be alone. The viewer is less a sharer of Maureen’s solitude than an intruder, and the cool allure of “Personal Shopper” is accompanied by a not-unpleasant tingle of voyeuristic shame.

Maureen herself sometimes seems more spectral than physical, even as her bodily presence, slipping in and out of rooms and clothes that don’t belong to her, is the film’s singular constant and the source of its curious emotional power. She is in limbo, caught between worlds, suffering from the disorientation that so often accompanies mourning. Her untethering from reality is echoed in the film’s matter-of-fact departure from realism, and her inertia is the expression of an overwhelming sorrow. “Personal Shopper” is sleek and spooky, seductive and suspenseful. It flirts with silliness, as ghost stories do. And also with heartbreak.

Read full review at New york times

Movie Rating ★★✭☆  

Kristen Stewart, otherworldly in 'Personal Shopper

Director Olivier Assayas's bizarre but transfixing "Personal Shopper " is not something that lends itself to a simple description. Loosely, it's about a young artist, Maureen (Kristen Stewart), who is coping (poorly) with the recent death of her twin brother Lewis while working as a personal shopper for a demanding Somebody in Paris.

But it's also a ghost story. And a mourning drama. And an erotic psychological thriller. And a whodunit. And a critique of celebrity vapidity (sort of). It is, in short, all over the place. And whatever the pieces add up to is rudely ambiguous.

Never has a modern film so astutely captured the mundane but all-consuming experience of emotionally charged texting. Instead of silly text clouds popping up in the frame, Assayas takes the viewer right to the phone screen and the tense fingers typing, sending, and waiting as the little bubbles tease that another is coming.

And then things take quite an unexpected turn for a film that thus far (besides the apparitions) has been pretty expectedly subdued.

Thank goodness for Stewart, who deftly guides the audience along on this jumbled journey. The always evolving actress is singular in excelling at occupying this ordinary space despite her extraordinary fame off screen. That she's already played an assistant-type for Assayas takes away a bit of the fun of seeing her as a normal bumping up against the equally unreal world of celebrity, but in "Personal Shopper" she gets to go a little more wild.

In the end, it might be too much to ask that a story about vague unfulfilled desire adds up to something concrete, but this film that came out swinging crescendos to a deeply unsatisfying shrug.

 Read full review at Daily Mail