Personal Shopper's director-scriptwriter at the Hong Kong
International Film Festival's post-screening Q&A
Personal Shopper (France-Germany, 2016)
- Screening as part of the HKIFF's Galas program
- Olivier Assayas, director and scriptwriter
- Starring: Kristen Stewart, Sigrid Bouaziz, Nora von Waldstätten
Less than 24 hours after I viewed multiple Berlinale award-winner On Body and Soul at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre,
I was back at the same venue for the Hong Kong International Film
Festival screening of the offering that -- rather inexplicably to my
mind -- won its helmer the Best Director prize at Cannes last year.
Charmingly, among my fellow audience members was ldikó Enyedi.
And given how wonderfully thoughtful and articulate she came across at
her film's post-screening Q&A, I must say that I would have
given quite a bit to hear her thoughts on Olivier Assayas' moody
offering: which, like hers, mixes together reality and imagination but,
to my mind, less successfully.
At one level, the protagonist of Personal Shopper
is indeed a personal shopper, whose job is to pick and pick up high end
fashion clothing and accessories from stores like Chanel and Gucci for
her jetsetting hardly-ever-home fashionista boss Kyra (Nora von
Waldstätten). An American in Paris, Maureen (Kristen Stewart) also
fancies herself to be a medium, like her twin brother Lewis, who
recently died from a congenital heart condition that his twin sister
also possesses.
Rather
than begin by showing Maureen going about her work, the film actually
opens with the titular character being dropped off by Lara (Sigrid
Bouaziz) at the now empty house which the latter and Lewis had called
home prior to this death. There, she awaits a visitation from Lewis, as
per a pact agreed-upon by the siblings some time back that whoever died
first would attempt to communicate with the other from beyond the
grave.
While
Maureen does have a paranormal encounter that night, she is unable to
tell whether she had been contacted by her late twin or some other
supernatural being. And later on in Personal Shopper, when she
receives messages over the phone from an unknown source, she again is
unsure whether the sender is Lewis or somebody else, and also whether
that somebody else is dead or alive!
This
uncertainty on Maureen's part also seems to be echoed on the part of
the film's director-scriptwriter: in that Olivier Assayas seems of two
-- maybe more -- minds as to whether he wants Personal Shopper to
primarily be a critique of our overly-materialistic, soul-threatening
contemporary society, a psychological thriller centered on a young woman
depressed by the loss of a loved one and drifting unhappily through
life, a crime drama involving a rejected lover out for blood or a
supernatural horror with some pretty scary spirits moving about -- and
maybe even stalking particular humans even as they move about from one
country to another.
Much clearer, however, is that Olivier Assayas considers Kristen Stewart
to be his current muse, and that -- as he divulged in the post-screening
Q&A I attended -- he allowed her considerable leeway to
improvize when making this ambiguous-feeling movie. For better or
worse, one result of this close collaboration between filmmaker and lead
actress appears to be her ending up having a lot more screen time --
and the vast majority of it alone -- than the star of a more
conventional cinematic creation would have.
Definitely less of a good thing as far as this (re)viewer is concerned is that Personal Shopper
can sometimes feel like a case of "too many cooks spoiling the broth"
or the designated helmer ultimately not wanting to take full control.
The generous might conclude that this film is consciously, even
admirably, equivocal. Those less inclined to be so -- frustrated, among
other things, by the ending of the film being way too inconclusive --
will tend towards the opinion that by trying to be different things to
different people, this work ended up dissatisfying quite a few of us.
My rating for the film: 6.0
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