Grief, Ghosts and Glamour: "Personal Shopper Review"

"A young American in Paris works as a personal shopper for a celebrity. She seems to have the ability to communicate with spirits, like her recently deceased twin brother.  Soon, she starts to receive ambiguous messages from an unknown source."

Directed and Written by: Olivier Assayas
Starring: Kristen Stewart

The questions asked of us by Olivier Assayas in his second collaboration with Kristen Stewart swirl around the film like one of its spirits, haunting you and pulling at you. And like a spirit, the answers are often times easy to miss and if you do find them, they're inevitably hard to grapple with. Assayas weaves a brilliantly intricate tale of love, loss, identity and grief that sometimes takes the shape of a murder mystery, other times manifests itself as a cat and mouse chase film and even still, formulates as a ghost story. You can call Personal Shopper one (or all) of those things and you'd be right. However, the film isn't interested in any of those labels at the end of the day, not really. No, Assayas is asking you to look beyond genre conventions to something deeper and more meaningful. If you can do that and stick it out until the end, you'll be greatly rewarded. 

Set in modern day Paris, Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is navigating through life in an almost ghost-like fashion. Which is apt because when she isn't performing her day job as a personal shopper to what appears to be a model, she's a medium for house-buyers who are wary of the paranormal. She hates her job and hates the woman she works for but she keeps at it because it pays the bills. She's staying in Paris because her brother has recently died of a heart attack from a malformation that she also has. Her brother, like her, was a medium and she's hoping to reach out and make contact with him at his old house just once before she departs Paris. In the midst of all of this she begins receiving text messages from an unknown number that increasingly become more sexual and angry the longer the film goes. If this all sounds like a an odd mix of plot points, well, it is. The beauty of the film is that Assayas isn't particularly interested in anything he lays out on the surface. Ghost story? Murder mystery? Stalking? Eh. Those are all prevalent but what's really at the heart of this and what makes it so special is what lies beneath all of that: Maureen herself.

Kristen Stewart as Maureen is giving not only the performance of her career but easily one of the best performances of the decade. In that decade she's delivered some incredible performances but nothing quite like this. Full disclosure, she's been one of my favorite actresses for awhile now but this performance easily pushes her to number one. There's an honesty in her performance that's so palpable that it alone is 50% of why this film works. Don't get me wrong, the story and tension are excellent but she's such an enigmatic presence that I truly don't believe that anyone else, man or woman, could have captured the emotions needed for this. She's twitchy, raw, angry, horrified and above all, real. You've never seen a performance quite like what Stewart gives here. It's so rare that you can watch an actor and sink into the film completely because of them. This film is asking you to believe and in some cases disregard a lot of things and without Stewart's bravery and honesty anchoring the film, you can't do that. I could write a whole post about her performance because I fell all the way in love with it. It may sound dramatic but there's moments that she's so devastatingly real that it nearly brings you to tears. She whispers and then yells all in the same sentence. She moves deliberately and effortlessly, all in one motion. You're watching an actress fully formed use every tool in her arsenal. She's easily the actress of her generation. The intensity and openness she's putting on display in not only this but in most of her work leading up to this, belongs somewhere in a bygone era. She's doing work that I can only equate to people like James Dean or Monty Clift or Brando. She's that good. 

Maureen is not only the anchor because of Kristen Stewart but because of what the film itself is wrestling with. She struggles with issues of identity and her ambiguous stalker insidiously forces her to come to terms with that. Through her grief and shame she tries to inhabit a life that isn't hers and in doing so the terms of what she's reaching out for fluctuate. This is a hard film to spoil because a lot of what happens is what you take away from it. Equally that makes it an easy film to spoil because I can't quite talk about my feelings on the ending without ruining it for you. There are many paths that you can take with this and none of them would feel wrong. 

That "take what you'd like" aspect of the film is accomplished as well as it is because of how masterfully Assayas switches gears. He broaches many different subjects and never fully commits to them.  As frustrating as it may seem in the moment though, it's not really an issue. Maureen is our focal point. Not the ghost story that happens in the middle that never fully materializes. The film isn't asking us if spirits are real because it shows us almost immediately. Instead it's asking us about ourselves. Can grief coupled with soul searching and a fight for your identity manifest itself into something more? Something real? Assayas earns the metaphysical core of his film by being so damn good at conveying genre conventions. He may not be that interested in telling a ghost story but when the film does turn into one for brief interludes, it's shot and framed perfectly. There are a few truly terrifying moments that are so effective because of the filmmaking and Stewart's reactions to the moments. When the film decides that it wants to be a murder mystery for 10ish minutes, it becomes a gruesomely tense thriller and again, Assayas and Stewart dive into it perfectly. I've never seen such a mishmash of a film that seamlessly blends itself together while still retaining the heart of what it's truly searching for. 

I really can't say enough about Personal Shopper and if I could, I'd sit here and write ten more paragraphs. It's truly a masterpiece that defies expectation and explanation. Kristen Stewart has become the most interesting actress in film and there's nobody even close to doing what she's doing here. Assayas flirts effortlessly with quite a few genres here and by the end the tantalizing thought of him doing any one of them as his next film is floating through your mind. A beautifully poignant story that forces you to look beyond the curtain to find yourself through loss. Not only loss due to death but the loss of oneself that comes from a close death. This is cinema at its finest and you won't find anything else like it this year. 

VERDICT

An absolute masterpiece that defies genre to become something else entirely. One part Hitchcockian thriller, one part Lynchian surrealism and fully a beast of its own, Personal Shopper is something to behold. As Assayas takes you through multiple genres without ever settling on one, you're transfixed by the master at work and soul his film possesses. Kristen Stewart gives the performance of her career and in a fair world she'll finally get an Oscar nomination for it. If the premise doesn't strike you immediately, see it first for her performance. It's hard to put into words exactly how brilliant she is. If the film ever sags (it almost never does) she keeps you glued to the screen. Easily the best and most interesting actress of her generation. Confront what it means to grieve and search for the meaning of an identity and come away with the most enriching film of the year.

10/10