The enigma of a "Personal Shopper": Olivier Assayas, "Personal Shopper," with Kristin Stewart

What is Olivier Assayas's new film "Personal Shopper" about?

In this film, Kristen Stewart has a conspicuously fucked-up life, and we know from the director's oeuvre that that is a condition that he finds interesting and never moralizes. Let me count the ways: She buys expensive clothing and jewelry from some celebrity (who never appears), and her frustrated identification with the luminary comes out partly in Stewart's enjoyment of trying the stuff on, sometimes even, ahem, getting off on it. We remember the echoes of "All about Eve" in Assayas's previous star vehicle for her and Juliette Binoche, so this is not surprising. She hates her job, and stays in Paris in order to contact or be contacted with her dead brother, who was a spirit medium. The viewer should quickly disabuse himself of any notion that the director believes that the relevant phenomena have an actual off-screen referent. Assayas is a follower of French sixties radical theory icons Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, and no one is more of a materialist of image, sound, and the articulation of visible and habitable spaces and of characters' movements through time and within and between them. If he is, perhaps. second to Garrel as the greatest post-Nouvelle Vague filmmaker in France, it is partly because this way of relating to time and space, where the movement through it by the characters is perhaps even more important than their personal psychology, is a legacy of Italian Neorealism by way of the early Nouvelle Vague directors (and most of Godard's output in the 60s). Stewart sees these holograms, which don't seem very friendly (in one scene there is a massively excessive throwing up), in the near-abandoned house where her brother had lived. Soon she is also being texted by a mysterious stranger whose identity is never discovered. The texted dialogue is basically a mind-fuck (by another mysterious background character, who knows/sees her without being known) that has uncertain valence in the friend/foe category. At the end of the film, she has displaced herself to Oman, but nothing is resolved, except an unpleasant subplot involving the woman she works for supplying her with clothing. Don't miss the German businessman, in a terrific delineation of character.

As for my opening question, I'm still trying to figure that out. Note in this regard a possible reflexivity of the kind European filmmakers have so often enjoyed: Stewart's project in the film is partly a hermeneutical one. And it is a question that she doesn't answer. That it may involve a certain eroticism changes nothing there. Nor does the fact that the text messages are partly intended as the statements of someone in the position of what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls "the subject supposed to know," to direct her movements. At a level that seems to me almost hopelessly banal, the film is also a story of her attempt to mourn. Voices of the dead are always stuck in the past; perhaps the Old Testament prohibited contacting them because, as with magic, it is always done as part of an appeal to resolve questions about a future that is open and indeterminate but in terms of a past that is perfectly given. But their being beyond time as well as the normal present space also renders them uncinematic in the terms I have described above.  If she is seeking an assurance (and direction) from some kind of Lacanian "big Other," who is supposed to know your truth, the one most proper to you, which might well be connected to death, she gets changes of mise-en-scène but no answers.