Every so often you get a film that plays its cards very close to its chest. So much of the film remains open to interpretation, and what you are left with is more mood and sensation than a rounded story with beginning middle and end that all logically holds together. Such a film is "Personal Shopper". It's a kind of a ghost story, and a kind of an obsessive stalker story... but it's also a story of grief and of wanting to be anything but who you are.
At the centre of the film is Kirsten Stewart, who plays an American in France whose brother has recently died. As they both believed in spiritualism, Stewart is looking for a sign that he's still around in some kind of afterlife - but her quest for him leads her to find something entirely different. Meanwhile her day job of being, as the title suggests, a personal shopper for a fashionista becomes entangled as she tries to resist the urge to enjoy the outfits she's buying for someone else.
I don't know that I entirely love this but I do appreciate the attempt to do something different with the ghost-movie genre. I do find Oliver Assayas' script and direction ultimately falls a bit short on committing firmly to a set of events that have actually happened and, particularly in the first twenty minutes or so, the pacing gets awfully slack, but the events towards the finale make this a not unrewarding watch.
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