Kristen Stewart reunites with Clouds of Sils Maria director Oliver Assayas to play a young American in Paris, buying haute couture for her celebrity boss, and seeking contact with the spirit of her dead twin brother.
Personal Shopper is affecting, singular and a great showcase for Kristen Stewart.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2016
Personal Shopper 2016
Olivier Assayas shared Best Director Award at Cannes this year for his open-ended hybrid of ghost story, thriller and high-end sociological observation. Kristen Stewart stars – in almost every frame – as Maureen, a young American woman in Paris, unimpressed by her fashion-world milieu and haunted by the spirit of her dead twin brother.
“Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas’s bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress...
An haute couture clothes buyer and general dogsbody to an insufferable A-list celebrity, practising medium Maureen is haunted, in all senses, by the recent death of her twin brother. Stalking his former abode at night seeking a final communication, she encounters a spirit or two – but whose? And are they following her, or are the insidiously instructive, anonymous texts that start invading her phone from another amorphous entity?
As Maureen’s already fragile composure begins to fray, it’s hard to tell if she’s plagued more by absence or uncanny presence: even her boss is barely visible to her, leaving a trail of curt notes and messages in her wake…
For the preservation of enjoyment, no more should be revealed about the film’s gliding, glassy sashay through multiple, splintered genres and levels of consciousness – except to say that Assayas, working in the high-concept, game-playing vein of his Irma Vep and demonlover, is in shivery control of it all.” — Guy Lodge, Time Out