The booing was adamant, but why? The good Cannes tradition is to express extreme sentiment of admiration and hatred, such as the overlong clapping at the gala screenings and the insistent booing in the press shows. We love and hate cinema, its joys and follies, its transcendental quality and turd-like stench, whatever we fancy it to be. Anyway, at the Monday press screening of Olivier Assayas’s “Personal Shopper”, the booing came right at the end. Which took me by surprise, because I enjoyed this genre-bending project by a very intelligent French director, this time starring American star Kristen Stewart as a fashion stylist and a psychic medium. Seriously.
“Personal Shopper” is a ghost story -- I mean, with electro-plasmatic white spirit floating over a chandelier like in a horror film. It is also a thriller, a drama of identity, and – this is also good – a live-action catalogue of brand-name high-fashion, with Stewart being the model, baring her body for the expensive clothes of our desire. Putting them all together requires cinematic faith and structural sleight of hand, and while the whole enterprise could sound preposterous -- a personal shopper of luxury goods who also doubles as a supernatural medium -- there’s an elegance in the way Assayas modulates his tone and rhythm. And Stewart (who appears in Channel ads in many magazines in Cannes) has emerged as an unlikely American muse in this Euro-arthouse.
The film takes place in Paris, Milan, Oman, and in an old house where Maureen (Stewart) tries to detect the presence of her dead twin brother. Assayas moves her around; Maureen hardly stays still, and likewise the film shifts nimbly from the horror-film mode, with banging doors and all, to quiet, reflective drama, and to a long, dialogue-less sequence during which she is stalked by a mysterious presence – a ghost, maybe, that keeps texting her.
Assayas isn’t afraid that it could all come out ridiculous -- it is ridiculous in a way, and he knows it from the beginning and doesn’t shy away from the fact. Now that the film was booed -- the first of the competition title to get that honour -- let’s see how it withstand the waves of Cannes critical consensus. Stewart, who carries the film entirely on her own, is a contender for the Best Actress prize; not a frontrunner from the look of it, but here we’re looking at a very interesting stretch in the career of this young star who, until recently, was a gangly youth who fell in love with a vampire.
Cannes Film Festival runs until this Sunday.
