Personal Shopper

I’m far from the Kristen Stewart detractor that my readers might reasonably assume me to be —  just because I’m not prepared to forgive her for her abominable performance in American Ultra, doesn’t mean I necessarily found her to be terrible in last year’s Clouds of Sils Maria. And considering I’ve been the fan of Olivier Assayas since I first came across his work at a film school screening of Demonlover, it’s a significant understatement to say that I was sadly let down by Personal Shopper — a film that takes an intriguing premise and squanders it on tepid melodrama and pointless ambiguity. And that’s coming from someone who usually likes ambiguity.

Assayas’ film received a smattering of boos when it premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival — a practice I cannot condone, but in which I would likely have participated given the circumstances. The problem’s not that it’s an overwhelmingly bad movie, rather, that it’s a significantly underwhelming one. The issue here is not, strictly speaking, Stewart’s performance — it would be more accurate to say that the script exposes too many of her weaknesses as an actor than that her deficiencies hamper the film.

Stewart plays a blank-eyed spiritual medium named Maureen, desperately seeking to contact her recently deceased twin brother while her day job as a personal shopper entails zipping around Paris on a scooter to procure overpriced consumer goods for a paparazzi-bait model. Stewart is required to be on screen in essentially every frame, and while it’s certainly not out of the question for her to carry a film, her role is underwritten relative to the amount of screen time it’s given. This requires her to fill vast empty spaces that should otherwise have contained story — which might have worked had she not filled those spaces with neurotic fidgeting that plays like someone mimicking anxiety rather than conveying it as a psychological reality.

Personal Shopper is ostensibly a psychological thriller in the guise of supernatural horror, and the film goes to great lengths in its efforts to build tension and suspense. I found it difficult to buy the concept that the principal ghost of this story haunts primarily via text message, but maybe I’m just old-fashioned and don’t know what hip ghosts are up to these days. Assayas is still a remarkably proficient filmmaker, and I left the theater wondering what he could do with a similarly high-concept supernatural suspense film had he abandoned the self-indulgence and succeeded in suppressing Stewart’s shortcomings. However, style was far from my biggest disappointment as I exited the theater — the film seems to end halfway through the third act, almost as though they ran out of film stock and just decided to call it a day.

Maybe if I hadn’t been looking forward to this movie to the extent that I was, I might be more generous in my assessment of its merits. As it stands, I found myself feeling like a personal moviegoer, someone paid to see films for those who can’t be bothered, suffering through that experience while haunted by the ghosts of better films. Rated R for some language, sexuality, nudity and a bloody violent image. Now Playing at Fine Arts Theatre.