Personal Shopper [137 points / 14 votes]
“Stanley Kubrick once famously said that he believed any film about ghosts was, regardless of other content, spiritually optimistic, since it suggested there was existence after death. These remarks were made in relation to his own film, The Shining, which, metaphysically-speaking, is about as far from optimistic as you can get while still hinting that death is not the end. On the other hand, Kubrick wasn’t talking about vampires or zombies, but specifically ghosts, and the ghost story is the one subcategory of horror than can exist completely apart from that genre. There can be funny ghost stories, sad ones, romantic ones, all without even nodding at anything frightening or dangerous. (A zombie story that tried to do something similar would at the very least need to deal with the fact that it deliberately wasn’t doing certain horrific things.)
“Yet rarely does a ghost story come along which attempts to be both of the horror genre and separate from it, but that’s, more or less, what Olivier Assayas is up to with Personal Shopper (which, for the record, I consider a horror film, just to make things confusing). In it, Kristen Stewart plays Maureen, a young woman in France with the titular job who works for a massive celebrity (Nora von Waldstätten), who is never around to buy her own outrageously expensive clothes. Maureen is also a medium who, when the film opens, has just suffered the loss of her twin brother Lewis, also a medium. Lewis’s belief in his own powers, and what they said about life and the universe, was a lot stronger than Maureen’s is in hers. However, she’s staying in France, rather than joining her boyfriend on another continent, because she expects Lewis to give her a sign that life, in some form, continues. Or she hopes he will. This was a promise he had made to her. And she does encounter a ghost, but one she doesn’t believe is Lewis, and one that may be malevolent.
“Assayas being who he is, Maureen’s investigation into spirits and spiritualism is done with and depicted through, and communicated to the audience via, various kinds of technology. Early in the film, Maureen is told that she would be interested in Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter and spiritualist whose abstract paintings predated the official beginning of the abstract art movement. To learn about Klint, Maureen watches Youtube videos. This brand of exposition occurs more than once, and I’m not sure how Assayas is able to get away with it, but he does, and there is something inexplicably artful about how he goes about it. It probably doesn’t hurt that this is actually what people do. Anyway, Klint said her strange paintings were inspired by spiritualist photographs of the early 20th century. So the technological advancement of photography led to a new type of modernist art whose roots, at least as far as Klint was concerned, are found in the oldest, most primitive, yet complex, questions about human life. And if you’ve ever seen those old spiritualist photographs that Klint and Assayas are referring to, you’ll remember that they feature people clad in just-barely-post-Victorian garb with great, waxy gouts of ectoplasm pouring from their mouths and noses – if you’re looking for an abstract image to illustrate man’s quest for meaning, you could do worse. Assayas even recreates this when Maureen first sees the ghost.
“At first it resembles, intentionally or not, the ghost effect (itself a small slice of technological modernity, though we needn’t make too much of this) in Lewis Allen’s 1944 light horror film The Uninvited. Then as it seems to be about to attack Maureen, its features solidify into something human, and it vomits ectoplasm. Life in a nutshell. That it might excite Assayas to explore much of these ideas through Maureen’s smart phone should surprise no one. An already, and justly, famous texting sequence about midway through Personal Shopper is one of the most suspenseful and eerie in any film last year.
“But much of Personal Shopper is about grief and loss. There are two ghost stories running alongside each other: the dangerous one that could lead Maureen to her death, and the one about her brother, dead of a heart attack at 27, from whom she just wants one irrefutable sign that he’s still around, talking to her, in his way. The film tells the audience little about Maureen’s life prior to our first sight of her, apart from what we know about her relationship to Lewis, and even though this forms the emotional center of Personal Shopper, we’re not even told much about that. But it makes it possible to wonder about her, and how different she might have been before Lewis died. Now, though her job is ostensibly glamorous (but also ‘stupid’ as one character puts it, a judgment Maureen doesn’t refute), and she’s young, and has more resources than most, she pretty clearly would rather be alone, somewhere quiet. Or barring that, she’d rather be someone else, as she admits. Who, though? Someone who knows more about the universe than she does? Someone whose brother isn’t dead? At times, Maureen shows that she has the same shallow desires as the rest of us, that it’s not all agonized ‘what does it mean??’ brooding, and the crucial texting scene seems almost to be about those desires – this is when her admission that she’d rather be someone else comes out, which itself leads to her secretly trying on her boss’s clothes, something she’s been tempted to do before. This basic unadorned humanity, a kind of subplot here, eventually reaches an endpoint, in a scene that is the film’s most unapologetically of the horror genre.
“Which means what? The very job Maureen is paid to do, the job of personal shopper, is itself a kind of exhausting example of modernity, an abstraction of the act of buying clothes for oneself. Horror is an abstraction of the fact of death, and horror movie deaths, which we get in Personal Shopper, are abstractions of the process of dying. And Olivier Assayas, through layer upon layer upon layer of modernity, technology, and art shows us that after a while, everything, including, or especially, the most vital things, will one day have an abstraction of itself, a doppleganger, a twin with a flawed heart.” ~ Bill Ryan
Fantastic review; quietly insightful. Tres bien!
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