Per­son­al Shop­per – first look review

How the hell did this movie get made? We pose this ques­tion in gen­uine awe, with absolute­ly no hint of back-bit­ing con­ster­na­tion. To call it a rough dia­mond is too con­ven­tion­al an assess­ment, and would also infer that we have any real inkling as to what the base mate­ri­als of this thing are. Occa­sion­al­ly it’s a genre movie, then it’s a study of grief, then a satire, then a mur­der mys­tery, then a Hitch­cock­ian thriller, and some­times it man­ages to be all that and more in the very same moment. Just as its hero­ine, Mau­reen (Kris­ten Stew­art), secret­ly dress­es up in the haute cou­ture of her celebri­ty pay­mas­ter in an attempt to ​“become some­one else,” this is a com­plex exper­i­men­tal movie which mas­quer­ades in an eye catch­ing gar­ment embla­zoned with sil­ver-span­gles and which boasts a deep, plung­ing neck-line.

A con­gen­i­tal heart defect takes Lewis to an ear­ly grave, while his twin Mau­reen ded­i­cates her life to find­ing clo­sure as a way of tak­ing the edge off her suf­fer­ing. As the lore of super­nat­ur­al fic­tion would have it, she also pos­sess­es extra sen­so­ry per­cep­tion and can see through spirt por­tals at cer­tain moments. Camp­ing out in her brother’s big, old, windy house, she waits for a con­nec­tion, a sign, any­thing that allows her to charge for­ward. When not hunt­ing ghosts, she tra­vers­es the Parisian boule­vards, select­ing clothes and acces­sories for her revolt­ing boss, Kyra (Nora von Wald­stät­ten). Assayas’ inten­tion is show how these two, seem­ing­ly dis­parate spheres can sub­tly, mov­ing­ly overlap.

Stew­art is the lifeblood of this film, and it’s her minute­ly cal­i­brat­ed and deter­mined­ly seri­ous per­for­mance that brings it bound­ing to being. She is able to make you believe that some­one could actu­al­ly live a nor­mal exis­tence with these hid­den pow­ers. But also, that they would irrev­o­ca­bly alter your per­cep­tion of nor­mal­i­ty. Sud­den­ly, banal exchanges become loaded with mal­ice and sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion takes on an eerie dimen­sion. An instant-mes­sag­ing tan­go between Mau­reen and an unknown par­ty is framed as a dia­logue with a spec­tral pres­ence, per­haps benign, but prob­a­bly not. As fick­le as it some­times may seem, Stew­art always appears as if she has a com­plete under­stand­ing of the mate­r­i­al and its inten­tions, and chan­nels this through ever small gesture.

Assayas, mean­while, taps a well­spring of thought on forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, using the film draw par­al­lels between 19^th cen­tu­ry draw­ing room seances and Skype calls. In Per­son­al Shop­per, death is just anoth­er form of alien­ation, a phys­i­cal remove from a per­son we once knew. Words them­selves come under close scruti­ny, and Assayas asks if we can ever tru­ly con­nect with anoth­er per­son if we’re not stand­ing right in front of them and com­muning ful­ly with the sens­es. The inces­sant buzz of a smart­phone becomes an atten­tion-grab­bing scream from out of the ether.

All that said, the film is far more enjoy­able to think about and dis­sect than it is to watch. The tonal shifts are pur­pose­ly attuned to frus­trate, and the task of deci­pher­ing where things might go next occa­sion­al­ly draw atten­tion away from the film’s obscure emo­tion­al core. It’s scary but it’s not a hor­ror film, and it’s philo­soph­i­cal with­out ever com­ing across as a ​“mean­ing­ful” art-house dra­ma. It could be a film about being Kris­ten Stew­art, a per­son who in real life casu­al­ly hops between worlds, tak­ing on new guis­es which help her to expe­ri­ence new emo­tions. It ini­tial­ly seems like a very dif­fer­ent film to Assayas’ beau­ti­ful pre­vi­ous, Clouds of Sils Maria, but even­tu­al­ly you might chose to see this one as its dear­ly depart­ed twin, trapped in lim­bo for all eternity.