Olivier Assayas
Personal Shopper

What Assayas has created is perhaps the most anomalous ghost film ever, certainly one of the most interesting. As well as one of the most significant cinematic works of the year (even though it was already presented - and awarded - at Cannes 2016).

It had not been since the days of Kairo, a masterpiece by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, that we had seen something so special and worthy of being told, seen, dissected, and finally left to its rightful filmic and existential mystery. However, the comparison with Kurosawa's film, made by some in recent months, is somewhat misleading. If, in that case, the already established author of the (in Italy) semi-unknown milestone Cure (a film that preceded the entire Japanese Horror wave exploded with Ringu), crossed the boundaries of the genre in an absolutely atypical and transcendental way, here we are faced with something even more unique and different. Personal Shopper, in fact, is more than a ghost film; it is a film with ghosts, where there is very little pure Horror left compared to what is indeed a dramatic auteur piece, featuring a medium who, more than seeking contact with the spirit entity (which she does do, claro), spends much of the film on a scooter through the streets of Paris and London procuring expensive and exclusive clothes for a secondary character who virtually never appears. Personal Shopper is Assayas's way of, besides painting another beautiful female portrait, dealing with ultimate themes such as death, identity, mourning, the afterlife. Living with the sword of Damocles over one's head. As far from Hollywood new-age paths as possible, in the era of the technological God, digitized communication, the smartphone with which you can even text a supposed spirit, in a surreal crescendo of tension and inscrutability.

The metropolis, with its wealth and its small-big dark sides hidden behind the relentless frenzy of (post)modern life. Even today, in the realm of information, the invisible and the intangible are still possible and indeed central, as much as incommunicability, in this dimension and even in possible others, regardless of whether they bring to mind and heart pioneering art by Hilma af Klint and the experiments of Victor Hugo (in a surprising and extraordinary moment of cinema within cinema). The origin of abstraction, spiritualism, and theosophy.

Personal Shopper hits hard on the mind, the eyes, and the heart (choose the order depending on subjectivity).

Stewart, although she is (still?) not a great actress, just like her former co-star Pattinson (see here, under the entry Civiltà Perduta), is, however, in constant professional progress (in Assayas she found somewhat what Robert found with Cronny), and especially endowed with strong stage presence and an undeniable and natural charisma, as well as a powerful sensuality that repeatedly breaks through the screen. That's enough to make her perfect for this role, in this film, at this moment.

For me, it is a masterpiece.