Review of Personal Shopper (2016) by Travis W — 08 Jan 2018

Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper supposes a world populated with invisible presences. They make themselves known through Youtube, texting, and ectoplasmic vomit.

It would be an overstatement to say Personal Shopper concerns communicating with these invisibles. The attempt is made, but the action of the film is more the waiting, the watching, and the reaching out. A world so profuse with messages and transmissions somehow only finds alienation at the other end.

The most material presence in Personal Shopper belongs to Kristen Stewart. Mostly solitaire throughout the film, Stewart's character, Maureen, stands entangled in a web of dubious correspondences. Communications with her employer consistently miss their mark; her brother may or may not be sending her messages from the afterlife; and an anonymous individual with a hint of omniscience keeps sending her texts.

Maureen's eyes search the screens of her phone and computer trying to locate connection and validation. How often do we find ourselves in a similar state? What is it we are asking of Maureen as her presence fills the screens of our own devices?

Rather than lumbering into a ponderous sinkhole of narrative energy, Personal Shopper couches its meditations on the physics and metaphysics of the digital age in a pile-up of subplots. Maureen's job as errand-girl to celebrity superstar Kyra (Nora van Waldstatten) provides its own axis of conflict and desire on which turns the fetishization of invisibility and voyeurism. On top of that, add a not entirely unrelated murder mystery; and, on top of that, add an even slightly less related communion with the supernatural.

All told, Personal Shopper is a sleek murder-mystery-ghost-story with splashes of haute couture and some casual globetrotting. Oddly enough though, the most thrilling bits are the text messages.