The movie stardom of Kristen Stewart is a fascinating to examine. She’s spent this decade taking down the image of Twilight‘s Bella role by role, challenging herself as a performer again and again. Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper is the second collaboration between Stewart and the French director. 2015’s Clouds of Sils Maria was about Stewart playing a personal assistant for a beloved actress beyond her prime (Juliette Binoche). Now, Stewart is the main character, but she is still playing a servant to a powerful, famous woman. Stewart plays Maureen, a spirit medium who daylights as a personal shopper for a world-famous fashion mogul (Nora von Waldstätten) in Paris. A few months after the death of her twin brother, Lewis – the twins suffer from the same heart malformation – Maureen is waiting in Paris, the place of his death, to hear a message from Lewis in the afterlife. Of course, Assayas’ venture into the ghost movie genre is far from the usual, a cerebral exploration into the spiritual world.

Maureen is a woman overcome by anxiety. She visits Lewis’ Paris home in her off time to see if she can summon his spirit. Otherwise, her days are mostly spent buying, picking up, delivering and returning obscenely expensive clothing and accessories for Kyra, her boss. The job depresses her. Her boyfriend Gary (Ty Olwin) lives in the states as a software engineer, and both supports Maureen’s spiritual exploration while not believing it can happen. Her boss is mostly absent, but her tyrannical presence is always felt. Maureen has been scolded for trying on the outfits that she chooses for Kyra, but the urge to do so still compels her. Maureen’s unorthodox life takes another odd turn when she begins receiving texts from an unknown number. The messages are provocative, suggestive and seemingly suspicious. Are these messages from the dead Lewis finally reaching out to her? In summoning Lewis, could Maureen have possibly courted another, more dangerous spirit into her life?

Nearly the entirety of Personal Shopper is Stewart’s performance. Her ragged fashionista style blends perfectly into this bruised, neurotic woman. Assayas is really wriggling out a hardened performance from his star, but Stewart should get a lot of credit for the degree to which she puts across fear, anguish, grief and paranoia without much in the way of dialogue. Her most common co-star is usually the text messages on her cell phone. There’s a degree to which Stewart’s direct, sometimes wooden acting style seems perfect for the 2010’s, as a rising generation of irony-loving millennials get the uncaring movie star they deserve. But Stewart has found something within herself to overcome her lack of emoting and find a way toward a new kind of emotional expression. Assayas is the perfect director for Stewart’s transformation, a director with a hardly-rivaled eye for coaxing brilliant female performances. Assayas won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for Shopper, and the film is exquisitely-made, a brilliant example of a director well in tune with the visual structure of his narrative. But it’s Assayas’ ability to let Stewart be the star that is Personal Shopper‘s best gift.

 

Written and Directed by Olivier Assayas