Personal Shopper

Personal Shopper (2016) is a supernatural thriller starring Kirsten Stewart and directed by the French film-maker Oliver Assayes.  (Assayes directed Stewart in The Clouds of Sils Maria, a year earlier.)  Stewart is apparently a big-time Hollywood movie star although it is hard to see exactly why she is famous -- she's an inexpressive actress with slouched shoulders who scowls a lot.  She's pretty in a Reese Witherspoon sort of way, but has a rather haggard-looking profile.  Stewart is good in a strangulated, low-key way in Personal Shopper, but doesn't seem to do much acting -- in this respect, she's rather like one of Bresson's photogenic, but blank non-actors:  the audience projects its fears and desires on her.  As the title advises, Kirsten Stewart plays an assistant to a wealthy, cat-eyed celebrity -- a woman famous, it seems, for being famous.  Her job is to purchase fantastically expensive jewelry, accessories, and garments for her boss.  She has no real relationship with her employer; we see her boss in only one short scene highlighting marital problems that the famous woman is having with her German husband.  The husband flirts a little with the personal shopper who can't achieve an audience with her famous patron -- she's on the phone with a lawyer in the room working to protect mountain gorillas or something on that order.  The supernatural aspect of the film relates the heroine's status as the survivor of her twin brother -- he has died unexpectedly due to a heart condition from which she also suffers.  Her brother, who was a medium, promised that he would attempt to communicate with his sister from beyond the grave and the film, largely, documents her encounters with ghostly, and often very scary, phenomena.  These manifestations are taken seriously by the film and shown in literal detail -- in one startling scene, a ghost appears as a haze of diaphanous mist and, then, vomits ectoplasm all over the heroine. (It's not all that different from some scenes in Ghostbusters). The movie contains many sequences set in dark and spooky corridors and old, abandoned mansions -- one of the heroine's sidelines seems to be finding properties that are legitimately haunted and, then, attesting to the specters to enhance the value of the real estate.  (Apparently, people enjoy the cachet of living in a haunted house.)  Stewart's character is alienated, morose, unhoused, without a country -- she lives in Paris but seems to come from nowhere in particular.  She has a boyfriend with whom she rather reluctantly skypes -- he's in Oman, doing some kind of computer trouble-shooting.  As the film progresses, Stewart's character begins to receive text message, perhaps, from her brother's spirit but, maybe, with a more prosaic source.  The text messages require that she go to a certain hotel room in Paris.  It's not clear whether the ghost wants to terrorize her or have sex with her.  The personal shopper becomes increasingly disoriented and frightened -- she has been told to never wear the clothing that she selects for her boss, but violates this rule and begins to traipse around in high black boots, strange BDSM-style harnesses, and expensive sequined dresses.  She doesn't go anywhere in this get-up but contents herself with simply masturbating.  (Fans of Kirsten Stewart take note:  the movie features a lot of nudity of its comely heroine.)  The movie's high fashion surface makes an eerie contrast with its ghostly subject matter -- clothing, it seems is like the mere flesh that we cast aside when we die.  Thus, the picture's very overt and annoying materialism, it's high sheen, seems somehow merely the inverse of the spiritualism that the film espouses -- the notion that there is an unseen world all around us thronged with spirits.  Several sequences in the film are very creepy indeed -- I felt my flesh crawl on a couple occasions.  Ultimately, the movie involves a murder and the heroine's encounter with the killer, an aspect of the film that is fairly rationally explicated, although those sequences involve one extraordinarily puzzling sequence of shots that really can't be reconciled to any narrative theme or thread in the movie -- the imagery has to do with elevators and automatically operated doors.  After the murder and its resolution, Stewart's character goes to Oman where she seems to have an encounter with the ghost of her brother.  It's a dictum in the ghost-hunting world that there are no ghosts and no haunted houses, merely haunted people and the film seems, ultimately, to espouse this notion -- although Assayes also seems to admit exceptions.   The direction is good and the narrative elliptical -- we grope our way into the story and clues as to what is happening are well-hidden, although in some instance in clear sight.  The movie is a haunted house full of dark closets and eerie staircases through which we have to navigate.  This is the kind of puzzle film that requires work on the part of the viewer -- we have to sift through the evidence and, ultimately, form our own hypothesis about what is going on.  Curiously, Assayes doesn't seem to know anything about the thousand paranormal reality shows on TV -- his ghosts harken back to the Fox sisters and their poltergeists, and the accounts of spiritualism written by Camille Flammarion (some of his imagery is based on 19th century spiritualist images).  A poorly made, rather naïve movie about Victor Hugo provides some background necessary to the film's narrative and it resolution -- we see that film as a movie within the movie (the heroine watches it on her phone).  Personal Shopper is continuously fascinating and extremely spooky in an enjoyable way.  It's not profound and the points it makes are clichés -- but they are, ultimately, points worth making.