Thoughts on Personal Shopper

Hilma af Klint, “Group IV, The Ten Largest, №1, Childhood” (1907)

When Personal Shopper, directed by Olivier Assayas, came out in 2016, I wanted to see it because I loved The Clouds of Sils Maria, but something kept me from it until February 2021, and that timing turns out to have been just right. Although it rattled me, I thank this film for plunging me back into the feelings roused by 2020, to experience them in a different way.

Quick recap/summary, with SPOILERS. Maureen (Kristin Stewart) arrives at the house of her recently departed brother to spend the night. Lewis was her twin, both had heart conditions, and his took him first. The two of them had a pact that they would send a sign from the other side, and since his death she has been looking for it. These first scenes have no dialogue—the camera simply follows Kristin Stewart through the house as she takes in the space, listening, darkness growing around her. The signs she winds up receiving, as the night continues and throughout the film, are ambiguous to the viewer—they may be part of Maureen's interior landscape or evidence of the supernatural. One sign, in the form of a mysterious messenger who engages her in a lengthy conversation by text while she is on a train carrying out errands related to her job as a personal shopper, has an obvious explanation. But I preferred to follow her at least partway into credulity, identifying with her and interpreting the texts as coming from Lewis even as I knew they were from Ingo, the creepy rejected lover of Maureen's boss whom she has met in an earlier scene. Only two of the signs, if I remember correctly, are seen by the viewer and not Maureen, both in the final scenes of the film: an electronic sliding door triggered without an apparent reason, and a blurry figure behind her who drops a glass. It's as if the viewer's belief replaces hers or is complicit with hers. 

What this all creates is a sustained experience of mourning, of failed attempts to connect to an other, of technology as a field where we play out our yearning for intimacy and create eerie echo chambers for our psyches: exactly the atmosphere of 2020 for much of the planet. Maureen, as so movingly played by Kristen Stewart, is a personal weather system, like the eye of a hurricane; you can feel the storm in her and see it externalizing itself all around her. 

Maureen tries harder to connect with the dead than with the living. The most life-affirming thing she does is to slip into her boss's skin by trying on the clothes she has fetched for her and sleeping in her bed—a forbidden act she is goaded into by her invisible correspondent. On her own, Maureen is drawn further into the spirit realm by Lewis's death, watching videos about Hilma af Klint and Victor Hugo's explorations of the supernatural.

A little digression about Hilma af Klint. My last foray into public before the coronavirus ended such excursions in March 2020 was the opening of a show of her paintings at Lightforms Art Center in Hudson, New York (I had missed the show at the Guggenheim the prior year). There I learned from lecturer David Adams that af Klint had followed and met with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, well-known for helping found the first Waldorf school. In 1908, Af Klint petitioned Steiner to view her work—hoping for affirmation from a fellow theosophist and believer that, in Steiner's words, "The astral world is the place where beings from different worlds can meet, so to speak." He was not as enthusiastic as she had hoped, and ultimately, suspecting that she was too avant-garde to be appreciated, af Klint left word in her will that her paintings should remain hidden away until 20 years following her death. Today she is considered a pioneer. I'll end this digression by linking her to the great actor and teacher of acting, Michael Chekhov. Like af Klint, he was a student of unseen energies, and this drew him, beginning in around 1918, to the work of Rudolf Steiner, which influenced his approach to acting for the rest of his life.  Also like af Klint, Chekhov was received unenthusiastically in some quarters during his life but is now considered to have been ahead of his time. Intangibles created the tangible for them both, and also for Maureen as brought to life by Kristin Stewart.

"The dead watch over us," says the new boyfriend of Lewis's girlfriend near the end of the film. It's a thought that momentarily asks us to consider Personal Shopper as a kind of twisted variation on Truly, Madly, Deeply. Like the grieving protagonist in that story, Maureen does, finally, choose to move on, at least physically. Is it her twin, Lewis, helping Maureen face her paralysis and affectless existence, but in a perilous, cloddish way—with thumps and menacing notes and breaking glass and a murder? No, Assayas concludes—we are alone, and endlessly able to haunt ourselves.

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