Personal Shopper - Amazon S3 · Personal Shopper Last night, my girlfriend and I stayed up late to watch a scary movie. I picked Olivier Assayas’s film Personal Shopper, a film

Personal Shopper

Last night, my girlfriend and I stayed up late to watch a scary movie. I picked Olivier Assayas’s film Personal Shopper, a film the Criterion Collection describes as “a chilling meditation on modern modes of communication and the way we mourn those we love.” If the title of Assayas’s film didn’t warn me it would be bad, Criterion’s description of it should’ve.

Personal Shopper is about Maureen (Kristen Stewart), an American living in Paris. By day, Maureen works as a fashion assistant; by night, she works as a medium. A year earlier, Maureen’s brother passed away from a congenital birth defect she also has. Maureen tries to reach her brother but to no avail. One day, on a trip from London to Paris, Maureen begins receiving text messages from an unknown number.

Problems with this film arise almost immediately. The film begins with Maureen conducting a seance at her brother’s house, only to be visited a by a ghost who’s not her brother. This scene builds beautifully; however, when the ghost first appears on screen, we realize this film is not the horror film we expected it to be.

Prior to making this film, Assayas made the film Clouds of Sils Maria, a film focused on an aging actress who comes to terms with her mortality. This film received numerous awards, and Stewart, who also has a role in this film, became the first American actor to win the César Award for Best Supporting Actress. With this film, Assayas exemplifies he’s an auteur comparable to filmmakers like Jean-Luc Goddard and Francois Truffaut. However, Personal Shopper lacks the ingenuity of Clouds of Sils Maria. When the ghost first appears on screen, it vanishes just as quickly as it appears. From there, all we’re left with is a question: “What was the point of that?”

Assayas’s point is not to scare but to question. Do ghosts exist? This question creates a problem, specifically with the plot. Maureen is reeling from her brother’s death. After Maureen’s seance, she begins receiving text messages from an unknown contact. (The

contact literally shows up as “Unknown.”) Is Maureen's brother trying to reach her through her iPhone? We don’t know. Maureen tries to discover the identity of Unknown. To find out who unknown is, Maureen plays games with the contact. These games either involve Maureen visiting hotel rooms and trying on expensive clothes or breaking into her boss’s apartment and trying on her boss’s clothes. (Why would her brother animate himself as a contact in her phone to make her do things like try on clothes or masturbate in her boss’s bed?)

From the moment Unknown begins texting Maureen, we never see Maureen without her iPhone in her hand. This creates another problem. Assayas focuses his film entirely on Maureen’s interaction with her iPhone.

The French New Wave introduced the world to unconventional filming techniques. Films like Goddard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows focus on characters doing mundane things like taking walks, smoking cigarettes, and reading books, but what makes these films interesting are looking at the way they were shot. Goddard and Truffaut use jump cuts and tracking shots to engage audiences.

Assayas focuses on something extremely mundane: texting. I’ll admit there’s something Assayas is hitting on with the idea of a person staring at their phone, dressed in nice clothes, smoking a cigarette. Having been a smoker, I know how therapeutic it feels to sit down, have a cigarette, and just surf the web, googling random ideas and thoughts. However, Assayas doesn’t do anything with his cinematography to make mundane things like texting seem engaging. We just hover over Stewart’s shoulder, watching her text only god knows, and this make his film one long boring experience where we’re forced to do nothing but stare at a screen.

I’ve steered away from talking about the performances in Assayas’s film long enough, mainly because the film isn’t about the performances; the film is about ideas regarding life after death. Stewart’s character is a bohemian vagabond wandering through Europe looking for answers (and clothes). Her being a good actor is beside the point. All she has to do is look cool and stylish, and that’s about it, which she does until she has to order a coffee or interact with sale associates. Let’s face it. Stewart can’t act. We knew that from watching her play Bella in Twilight. However, there’s something hypnotic about watching her do mundane things like light a cigarette. But Assayas ruins Stewart’s cool because, for some reason, he thinks he’s the next Charlie Kaufman.

What makes a film good isn’t always the actors. Take Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation for example. The only good actor in the film is Meryl Streep. (But when is she not good?) Nicholas Cage, the “star,” tries to hold his own with Streep but can’t because he can’t act. However, the acting isn’t the point of this film; it’s the story and the way it’s told.

Adaptation is about a writer not being able to adapt a book into a screenplay, so he writes a screenplay about a writer not being able to adapt a book into a screenplay. The point of the film is the writing process, not the acting process. Jonze cast actors not based on their ability to act but on their ability to play their roles. Assayas failing to realize the point of his film by showing not telling is why his film is so bad.

I can imagine someone reading my review and asking “Well, if Personal Shopper is so bad, then why'd it win at Cannes?” Well, Personal Shopper didn’t win at Cannes; Assayas won; he won the Best Director Award. However, Assayas winning the Best Director Award at Cannes isn’t saying much because, according to Peter Debruge, a film critic for Variety, Personal Shopper was booed after it screened. The question that should be asked is “If Assayas won, then why’d Persona Shopper lose?”

Personal Shopper lost because it’s a bad film. Assayas’s plot is indescribable; his writing makes Stewart, an already bad actor, look like a worse actor; and his film is boring. I, like Maurine, found myself obsessed with my phone because, like the film, I got sidetracked. What happened with her brother? Was he Unknown?

My girlfriend warned me about Personal Shopper. (She told me the title sounds stupid and Criterion’s description of it is confusing.) I made the mistake of arguing, “No, Criterion wouldn’t publish this film if it weren’t good; they only gather the greatest films from around the world and publish them in editions offering the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplements.”

Going back to Criterion but specifically Jon Mulvaney, the man in charge of answering customer questions, why did Criterion gather and publish this film?