Personal Shopper

This film screens as part of Pix Rendez-Vous. The section is a collaboration between Oslo Pix and Institut Français, and includes nine French titles at this year’s programme. It is a continuation of the festival Rendez-Vous with French film, which for many years has presented the remarkable quality of contemporary French cinema to a Norwegian audience.

Firmly established in the highest echelon of current French auteurs, Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Summer Hours, Carlos the Jackal, etc) has featured in the Cannes Film Festival’s ultra-prestigious Palme d’Or competition no fewer than five times since 2000. The former critic—who pioneeringly sang the praises of genre cinema in print—took Best Director honors last year for this enigmatic psychological drama with supernatural, metaphysical and horror-movie undertones. His second consecutive collaboration with American phenomenon Kristen Stewart—following 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria—it’s the story of Maureen, a recently-bereaved young woman who works as a personal shopper for high-end Paris clients. Traumatised by the recent death of her twin brother in the French capital, Maureen becomes gradually disconnected from her chic, impersonal surroundings and starts to strongly suspect that she’s being observed, perhaps even stalked, by some kind of ghostly presence. But is there a more rational explanation for the weird phenomena she encounters?

Reviewing for the New York Times, A.O. Scott called the film “sleek and spooky, seductive and suspenseful,” commending the “Hitchcockian flourishes” which propel the plot down its increasingly dark—but, thanks to ace cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, always alluringly photogenic—avenues. An elegantly sophisticated and provocatively daring combination of genres and moods, anchored around a brave and truly compelling central performance, Personal Shopper offers a haunting experience in many more ways than one.

Actor Anders Danielsen Lie will talk about the film at Kunstnernes Hus Kino on Friday June 9th.

Son of screenwriter Jacques Remy, Olivier Assayas (b. Paris, 1955) started as a production assistant on big-budget titles including Superman (1978). He directed his first short, Copyright, in 1979. From 1979-85 he worked as a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, and then directed Disorder (1986), first of more than a dozen features. In 2009 he married French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve.