Recensioni de* critic*

It’s a bleak masterpiece: Not even the David Cronenberg of Videodrome (which it sort of remakes, with the internet swapped in for basic cable) matches its hallucinatory vision of a culture ensnared—and enslaved—in its own intellectual dark web.

Familiar themes of existential unease, techno-horror, and the follies of late capitalism are presented here with a minimalist touch, complemented by Stewart's phenomenal interior performance, and aided by subtle yet effective sound design and a light tincture of special effects. With equal parts playfulness and artfulness, Assayas uses remixed genre elements to fashion a phantasm: a galaxy-minded rumination on the struggle for meaning—of identity, art and spirituality—in the post-millennial era.

Assayas' camera lets Stewart control the frame with her entire body and injecting even her text message conversations with personality, like her dubious punctuation. Assayas chooses to constantly reinvent the movie throughout from a fashion picture to a ghost story to a murder mystery. It keeps viewers on their toes, and at the center is Stewart who gives what is the best performance of her career to date in one of the best movies of the year.

The constellation of detailed moments creates the suspense and mystery of the film: Maureen experiences the presence of a ghost in her brother's house, later she hears an offhand comment about technology being a conduit for the spirit world, so when she receives a knowing text message from an unknown number it feels entirely plausible for her to reply, "Are you alive or dead?" Nothing is overplayed here, instead each development evenly unfolds, building upon what came before.

The film is an eerie ghost story, taking place in a landscape of almost total spiritual flux. It's a mournful contemplation of grief and loss, mortality flickering on the periphery, and Maureen's attempts (mostly failed) to communicate with the dead gives her a desperate urgency. Nothing is stable in "Personal Shopper"—not jobs, relationships, gender, identity. "Personal Shopper" teeters gloriously in the gap of the perpetually "in-between."

An actor of fierce intelligence who is also capable of conveying a palpable unguardedness, Stewart inhabits Maureen with both virtuosity and complete commitment. (Her performance in Clouds of Sils Maria earned her a César Award, the French equivalent of an Oscar; she was the first American actress to win the prize.) Even while engaged in an activity as ostensibly banal as texting, Stewart is mesmerizing.

Strange, compelling, and at times frustrating, Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper is – appropriately for a modern-day ghost story – a film determined to disorient and unsettle both its characters and viewer throughout. Defying genre conventions and easy conclusions at every turn, it is somehow a postmodern pastiche of gothic horror, a nuanced portrait of grief, and an investigation of life under late capitalism – all at the same time.

Assayas is a self-consciously diverse filmmaker whose stylistic swerves and sometimes wildly different aesthetics/thematics allow him to repeatedly return to the same general thematic interests without getting stale... [Assayas's approach] places him in a long lineage of French filmmaking, aligning himself once again closer to Truffaut; Personal Shopper is a manifestation of the strains and resulting pleasures of navigating these questions.

The first time one encounters Olivier Assayas's latest film, one is bound to be simply caught up in its strange mélange of genres and styles: its mix of ghost story, paranormal mystery, and character drama, of naturalism and surrealism. Upon a second viewing, however, it's a feeling of melancholy that dominates.

Assayas layers two historical iterations of ghosting that serve as provocative analogues: the contemporary experience of technologically dependent, physically disembodied communication via text messaging and Skype calling, and the late 19th century/early 20th century wave of spiritualists who sought to connect with the afterlife. The way in which these two eras are linked... is pure Assayas in its deceptive banality, its nonjudgmental deployment, and its in-the-moment layering.

The money is good but Maureen heavily resents the job – not just for her boss's tyrannical, self-absorbed manner, but also because it bores her and keeps her from her real obsession: trying to commune psychically with her dead twin. The difference in registers between these two pursuits is a bizarre and interesting pairing that takes the film beyond what might otherwise have been just a breezy lampoon of industry narcissism, or a straight-up supernatural thriller.

Much is made of the risk that goes into acting, of performers putting their bodies on the line, but directors are inevitably equally on the line... Olivier Assayas's "Personal Shopper" is a big leap and a big risk, one that puts his artistry to the test along with that of the movie's star, Kristen Stewart; from the start, it's an admirably bold movie that suggests an unusual and palpable urgency on Assayas's part, which only makes its failings all the more pronounced.