PERSONAL SHOPPER

Maureen (Kristen Stewart), a young American in Paris, buys clothes for the celebrity Kyra, who has no time for fittings. She despises the job, but it keeps her in the city – and what keeps her in the city is her twin brother Lewis, who died shortly before. Maureen waits for a sign from him and spends nights in his empty house, where something inexplicable stirs. Then anonymous messages start arriving on her phone, seeming to know her better than she would like. “Personal Shopper” (2016) by the Frenchman Olivier Assayas combines grief work with a ghost story and a thriller.

Olivier Assayas of France stages this as a meditation on today’s forms of communication and on how one mourns those one has loved – deliberately ambivalent and more poetic than his previous collaboration with Kristen Stewart, who here wavers between grief and emancipation. At its premiere in the Cannes competition there were boos and standing ovations; the jury awarded the director’s prize in 2016, shared with Cristian Mungiu. The film was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2016 in the French Preview section.

Shown at the 2016 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2016 · Film Archive