Personal Problems

I knew of Personal Shopper (2017) pretty much as an Olivier Assayas, starring Kristen Stewart as a personal shopper - that's it. Didn't sound like my thing. When Netflix pushed it as a supernatural thriller, I figured I'd try it on Ms. Spenser.

We meet Stewart going into a spooky old house. She is going to spend the night and try to contact the spirit of her dead brother. We learn slowly over the first act that the woman taking her to the house is her widowed sister-in-law, who wants to sell the house to friends of her and the brothers' but only if the spirit is ok with it. The brother, Stewart, the friends are all into spiritualism. The night at the house showed that there was a presence, but nothing definite.

Stewart is staying in France working as a personal shopper for an actress, Nora Waldstatten. As she tells a shopkeeper when picking out some dresses, she's a busy person who doesn't have time to do nornal human things. It's a dead end job with a lot of aggravation, but she wants to stay near where her brother died. She has a boyfriend, doing an IT contract in Oman, who wants her to join him. But she is still looking for closure.

She meets Waldstatten's lover, Lars Eidinger, who is being thrown over. Shortly after this, Stewart starts getting mysterious texts - at first she thinks they are coming from her brother on the Other Side. (but it's really Eidinger). The texts encourage her to do dangerous things, like wearing Waldstatten's clothes and going to a certain hotel room. But when she does, she finds Waldstatten's bloody corpse. 

So this low-key art-house ghost story becomes a murder thriller for a little while. But this wraps up fairly quickly and undramatically. That isn't what this movie is about.

It ends with Stewart going to Oman, and being followed by the ghost. The cinematography is beautiful - the rest of the movie has been in somewhat drab and rainy France and London, but Oman is ancient and sun-drenched. But it doesn't solve Stewart's problem - the problem must be within her. (Spoiler.)

Assayas is a sort of late son of the French New Wave - I loved his Irma Vep. He's made an interesting, unusual and spooky movie here. Strangely, he has made one other movie about Stewart in relation to an older actress - Clouds of Sils Maria. But I don't think it has any ghosts in it.