Kristen Stewart Takes Center Stage in “Personal Shopper”
By Skip Sheffield
See Kristen Stewart as you have never seen her in “Personal
Shopper.”
That is known as a grabber. Kristen shows a lot of flesh in
“Personal Shopper,” but otherwise this small French indie movie is a baffler.
Stewart previously worked with writer-director Olivier
Assayas in “Clouds of Sils of Maria" (2014), with the incomparable Juliet Binoche.
This time Stewart takes center stage as Maureen Cartwright,
the personal shopper of the title to Paris fashion model/designer Kyra (Nora
von Waldstatten). Kyra gives Maureen a literal blank check to buy high-fashion
clothes and expensive jewelry as she flits around the globe.
Maureen prefers dressing in jeans and T-shirts. She gets
around Paris on a scooter. Lately she has taken to staying overnight in Kyra’s
luxurious apartment and trying on her expensive clothes.
Meanwhile there is a moldering old mansion outside Paris
where Maureen and her twin brother Lewis grew up. Lewis died young in that
house of a rare heart disease, which also afflicts Maureen. A young couple is
considering buying the old place, but they worry it might be haunted. Among her
other talents Maureen is a medium in contact with the spirit world. Evidently
her spirits can text.
Yes, “Personal Shopper” is a ghost story, but it also is a
murder mystery. That mystery is never solved and just left hanging.
In short “Personal Shopper” is hard to categorize. If you
believe in ghosts and the afterlife, you may lend more credence to this tale.
If you are a skeptic you may wonder what’s the big whoop? The one thing on
which I think we can all agree is that Kristen Stewart gives her all for this role.
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