We see something in the beginning, in the opening sequence, (someone arriving at a big old creepy mansion) that at first feels dangerously cliché, a part of me couldn't help but think, I've seen all of this before, haven't I? Well, I had to shush myself fairly quickly.
I thought we were going to see a fragile, scared young woman who would have to survive living in a haunted house and convince others of the fact that there were indeed ghosts in the great big, lonely house and not just demons in her head.
It immediately tells us the woman locks herself up in the house on purpose: her twin brother died, of the heart condition she shared with him.
Both are mediums meaning that they can communicate, with ghosts and the beyond and all that jazz and they made a promise that if one died, the other would send a sign as proof of the afterlife, that they were ok.
And that's why she's seemingly not afraid in a house all of us would pee our pants in because she wants to make contact with his spirit, is intensely hoping for it.
Maureen is also far from the stereotypical, amulet draped film medium. She's just an average American, 20 something, she wears baggie, non-flashy, comfy clothes (but boy do those ever look good on Stewart!) copes with an unhealthy smoking condition that's probably not helping her heart addiction, and she doesn't like her job.
Aside from the fact that she can communicate with spirits, she's at first seemingly devoid of any personality. The kind of person that wouldn't stand out from a crowd, she's completely mumblecore.
It almost is something that if it weren't for the ghost would seem like a boring basis for a story, it sounds like I just described a very boring woman, so why would you wanna watch a whole film of her?
Well because soon enough,we discover why she is in Paris, and it’s especially when we watch her interact with the world around her, Stewart outplays an iPhone here and makes the device into an eerie, threatening costar but I'll touch on that later...
Early on we discover why she is in Paris and how she sustains herself. She is in Paris, specifically because she wishes to contact her brother in that old house, it's her number one obsession, she won't leave there and resume a normal life, won't live her life until she hears from him.
So Paris is simply the opportunity to hopefully make contact with her twin, and logically she expects to do that in the house he died in. She stays in that house and has created a little niche in the great big house for herself, a little space of hers.
She sustains herself by working for a spoiled, celebrity, that makes her run around in Paris, even London to pick up obscenely expensive, designer clothes, but has forbidden Maureen from trying them on. And in the meantime, she's also working as the medium for a French couple that wants to buy the house and is sure that there are no ghosts in it.
Maureen hates the job and sees it only as a way to establish that contact with her brother she is so obsessed about, as she even says 'I'm waiting', only willing to resume her own life once she has established that contact.
But in the meantime her life resembles, an hour of waiting at the doctor on an infinite repeat, it's a lonely sad, picture. And I think that is somewhat the point of the film.
Many people have gone on various theories, trying to explain 'Personal Shopper' and it's many twists, and plotlines that are seemingly not cohesive, and how it all connects to the somewhat ambiguous, difficult to interpret the open ending. I think that 'Personal Shopper' can have an interpretation that's different for each of us.
I won't say I had a completely clear understanding of it, but that doesn't matter, I think more than anything 'Personal Shopper' is about grief and how not having been able to let go, has stopped the person from living.
She is seen as somewhat upset, whens she discovers that the French girlfriend of her brother, has struck up a new relationship and has been able to let him go, even as she claims she still loves him, Maureen seems to want to, but she can't, she's still quite literally haunted.
And I think like in all of us (in some more in others less) from an inherent fear of death, we’ve probably all wondered what happens when we die, or if you’re really sinister you might even have wondered how it is you will die.
Maureen wants contact with her brother as a sign of the existence of the afterlife, she wants to know that he's ok, perhaps as a reassurance to know that it'll be all ok once she dies as well. Some have speculated on whether Maureen herself is her own ghost (according to some she dies at one point in the film) but I'm not going to delve into any of the theories.
'Personal Shopper' is a ghost story, but a 21st-century one, gothic blends perfectly between the modern, stylish world of luxury clothes and couture, one minute you're in a designer store, the next you're in and old creaky house, and it doesn't feel weird or out of context.
'Personal Shopper' is a ghost story, like I said but it really isn't. At least not in the flashy sense, there's one intense scene in which Kristen Stewart flees the house after she's been confronted with a spirit, that she's sure isn't her brother, in a trembling voice she utters “you’re not my brother” she exuded such an intensity and such a genuine cowering fear here that I could almost hear my heart pumping.
But that's one of the few instances of true horror. 'Personal Shopper is more than a ghost story, it's a film about loneliness, about not belonging.
About living but not really living, living an empty meaningless, ungratifying existence while you're still alive, being dead while you're alive.
It's about how living in the modern world can be numbing at times, which as is hinted at here ultimately comes from an inability to appreciate the world around us; Maureen drives around Paris on a motorcycle, a few times we see her having genuine fun, but mostly the beautiful city around her escapes her.
If we had no idea that Maureen was a medium and that she was in Paris to investigate her brother's death if there were no ghosts at all.
I'd say we were watching an ill woman, a woman that suffers from a debilitating, soul-numbing depression, a woman that doesn't love life anymore and it's very likely that she does suffer from depression.
The way I described her earlier made her sound boring, but it isn't that she doesn't have any joy in her life or interests. She's interested in art.
We get to see her watching a documentary on an abstract artist, we even see her draw the big house, and they're not bad drawings either, she could do something with it... But she doesn't the will isn't there. Mostly she just shifts through life, like an anonymous entity, like a ghost herself.
And like I said earlier it all comes from an inability to connect with the world and people around her, it's not at all implied that it's all her fault, she is not the one being criticized here, but rather modern communication and the at times isolating way in which we shift through the world nowadays.
Her iPhone earbuds, seem to have grown to her like they're an extra limb of her body, why does need to hear some sort of noise almost the entire time?
There's even her cigarette smoking vice, anything to keep her distracted from the world around her, and possibly her own thoughts, maybe if she didn't she would go crazy...
Even the communication with her American boyfriend, who is in Oman for his job, feels deeply impersonal and unsatisfying, she ignores his Skype calls, this signifies something seriously wrong, most of us would be looking forward to the prospect of talking to our partner.
And when they do Skype, the scenes create an unease in us as the viewer, we're not watching two people that seem to get along great, or that even know what to say to each other.
There's a scene in which Maureen cries, during the Skype, on his part, there is no real effort to console, he is merely annoyed. It's good they weren't wasting money on expensive, international phone calls, it absolutely wouldn't have been worth the money...
The only palpable real contact is with the girlfriend of her brother, here we see someone that knows a lot about Maureen, that seems to genuinely like her and care about her.
Even the woman she works for, she only gets to actually see once, if you said everybody in this thing is a ghost, I actually would buy that.
And yet I dare say there is still joy and spark and lust for life in Maureen.
Even if I wasn't always quite sure she actually was alive, but there are certainly moments that she lives up, and in those, we see a ghost of the sparkling, bubbly, young woman that she could be. Which brings me to when I mentioned that Kristen outshines, her costar the iPhone here.
What every woman dreads happens to Maureen, and rarely have I ever during any film felt such a displaced anxiety and fear, you're afraid for her, it's because the scenario is realistic, it could happen.
Your phone lights, it's a message from an unknown number, it says "I know you.", which is then quickly followed by "And you know me", now knowing Maureen's situation, I initially thought like I think pretty much anyone that saw it assumed that it was perhaps her brother contacting her.
But the texts soon take a sinister turn, what brother would send his sister "I want you.", and " And I will have you." That would be some dysfunctional shit...
Most women would in this scenario probably just the block the number. Maureen doesn't, she even becomes somewhat intrigued. She's having some contact that seems real, scary but it feels real to her... Someone is actually expressing an interest in her.
Quickly a sort of creepy texting/flirting begins. Where Maureen is initially scared, she quickly loosens up even becomes somewhat playful. Whoever the person behind the phone is, is challenging her, is making her do things that would normally scare her, and she gets a kick out of them.
It's trying on the clothes of her employer because she's expressly forbidden to do so, and Maureen in those instances looks like someone else, perhaps even feels like someone else. She types in "No desire when it's not forbidden."
She later masturbates in of the clothes, on her employers, something she'd never have allowed, and that's why she seems to be doing it because it's something that's naughty, that she's not supposed to do, and she finds it exhilirating.
In the background here there's the creepier idea, she tells phone person that she did everything minus the getting her rocks off part, but why would she tell this to someone she doesn't know? Because she expects a seductive answer, almost like she wants to be played with, since it almost feels like she's putting on a show.
We technically don't know it's a man, but somehow it just clicks that the person behind them is not a woman, we later literally find out who it was. However, if you've been a somewhat attentive viewer, you'll probably have gotten there yourself.
That performance, doing something that she shouldn't be doing, also the possible thrill of someone finding out livens her up. She seemingly doesn't do much here but an interact with a phone, and yet she's brilliant in every scene with the phone, her face conveys every emotion we've all felt when we were on our phones.
The excitement of getting a new text, even the flirty ridiculous smile, when a conversation steers in a direction that's a bit different. We've faced frustration, even disgust. We've all panicked when the person suddenly stopped replying, why are they not answering me? What did I do? I’ve scared him/her off for good right?
The read option has never seemed so scary, so ominous. the anonymous texter starts to send her threats, Maureen panics and starts firing panicked text after panicked text, and then, the person simply stops replying, while having read the messages. It's to make clear she no longer has the upper hand.
Perhaps disconnection made her an easy target, someone with ill intent, that could sense she was vulnerable and desperate for contact and abused that.
Maybe Maureen was so tired of living like a ghost, that she tried to reach out in the most dangerous way, in the way that would endanger her life. that's a truly scary thought.... Considered, deleting my Whatsapp for a mere matter of seconds, my phone suddenly seemed like a really scary device.
As I watched 'Personal Shopper' with a friend, she remarked: It's a weird role for her, I don't imagine Kristen Stewart with an urge to try on other people's clothes.
And there's some sense in that, she does look oddly not like herself like she's more at home in her own clothes, and like she's not at home, in that world of luxury and glamor.
But yet it also fits, here's a person that's hurt, struggling with herself and tired, and at one point she quite literally answers yes to the question “do you want to be someone else”?.
Perhaps it's not so much so literally about being someone else, as about being someone that isn't lost, someone that's got a clear purpose, a clear path to walk in life, someone that is actually out there, actually living.
If I would have to describe 'Personal Shopper in just a few sentences, I'd have to say it's about anonymity, about existing, but not living, about going through this world like a ghost.
Which why Assayas perhaps decided to let the world of luxury boutiques and a haunted, old French gothic mansion converge with one another.
And it all works actually, never do you get the sense that you're watching something chaotic. It's a stylish, yet cold and clinical world, and you wouldn't want to be in it. But I do believe that the film wouldn't have worked without Kristen Stewart.
Kristen Stewart plays a woman here that could be endlessly boring had she been played by a lesser actress because it just at times seems like not much is going at all with her.
Yet she has an intensely physical performance here, her face tells us all at times, she's highly transparent, and she makes it seem like it's the easiest thing in the world.
Which is why some people probably say that Stewart can't act, that Stewart is just being Stewart in a room where there happens to be a camera.
Yet it's probably a lot more difficult than it looks. Stewart demands you to keep your eyes on her, yet she never has an overbearing, over dramatic intensity to her that makes it really obvious that she is acting.
She always seems natural and calm, until she isn't, and when she isn't it seems to come naturally from within her, and when she was afraid in that house and panicked and screamed, you felt her fear I was reminded of some of the cinema's most well-respected scream queen performances.
All I can really add now that is that I hope this is one of much more to come collaborations between Stewart and Assayas, the two just seem to get each other, and work well with each other, up until now the result has been two great films.
You could even argue that 'Personal Shopper' is a bit of a companion to 'Clouds Over Sils Maria', in that one Stewart very likely ghosted her boss, because she made her feel like a mere shadow to her star.
