Personal Shopper Kristen Stewart, Sigrid Bouaziz, Lars Eidinger. Directed by Olivier Assayas. Rated R. Opens Friday at AMC Town Square.
After her acclaimed turn in 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria (for which she became the first American actress to win a prestigious César Award in France), Kristen Stewart reunites with writer-director Olivier Assayas for the similarly baffling but less effective Personal Shopper. Once again, she plays an underappreciated assistant to a glamorous famous person, whose connection to her boss is complicated and potentially dangerous. Here, Stewart is Maureen Cartwright, an American living in Paris and working for a self-centered socialite who doesn’t have time to shop for her own ridiculously expensive clothes. Maureen is also a psychic medium of sorts, and she’s in Paris because she’s waiting for a sign from the ghost of her twin brother, who recently died there of complications from a heart condition.
Part ghost story, part glossy lifestyle porn, part murder mystery and part existential meditation, Personal Shopper never quite fits together as a movie, as Maureen moves from encountering an actual spirit in her brother’s old house to picking out high-end outfits for her bitchy boss. Assayas may be trying to say something about the emptiness of modern life, how we are all haunted by our pasts and the emotions we put out into the world, but the movie is too unfocused and obtuse to get that across. It’s occasionally unsettling and sometimes mildly suspenseful, especially during a lengthy text-message exchange between Maureen and an unknown person who may or may not be a ghost.
As tense as that sequence is, though, it’s sometimes undermined by Maureen using text abbreviations to ask questions of life and death. Similarly, Assayas can’t quite bridge the gap between the story’s metaphysical and grounded elements, even if both can be powerful at times. The end result is frustrating rather than mystifying, a movie as aloof and unreachable as Maureen herself.
