Reel Time: Material & Immaterial in Personal Shopper

Personal Shopper is the latest collaborative effort from Kristen Stewart and director Olivier Assayas, following on from Clouds of Sils Maria in 2014, and it's confounding, infuriating, and exciting audiences both commercial and critical. Though I don't claim to understand this film any more than the next person - I still don't know if I actually liked it - I do think a significant thematic development is the relationship between the material and the immaterial throughout the film - that is, the stuff that Stewart's character, Maureen, a personal shopper and medium living in Paris, shops for versus the spiritual affirmation she seeks from her recently deceased medium twin brother.

that Chanel dress though

A significant portion of Maureen's daily life is spent at her job as a personal shopper for her boss, Kyra, whose penchant for designer fashion sends Maureen anywhere and everywhere, within and outside of the country, for the latest stylish wares. These sequences are wrought with constant product placement - Chanel, Louboutin, Cartier, amongst others - that are no doubt present due to Stewart's prior working relationships with high fashion brands, most famously with Chanel. This product placement seems ham-handed but is deliberately so, you're supposed to notice the brands, you're supposed to see the name printed boldly on the carrier bag. This is tapping into precisely the clout expected from a designer brand, which comes equipped with a certain heft and substance, both physical and cultural, which never comes from fast fashion. Similarly, procuring these designer brands is a cumbersome process in itself for Maureen, with extended trips between locations in Paris and a trip on the Eurostar to London to pick up a couple of dresses. As such, the material aspects of her daily life are demonstrated as weighty, cumbersome, overwrought processes that demonstrate a kind of solidity and concreteness - rather than being delivered by courier and ordered on the internet, everything is intensively sourced, picked, collected.

I cannot think of anything more cumbersome than carrying Louboutin's on my shoulder on a moped

It's this engagement with the solid, the physical realities of transporting these garments that warps Maureen's capacity to properly engage with the spirits she, as a medium, is sensitive too. With the recent death of her twin brother from a heart condition they share, Maureen is both grieving and seeking proof of the material existence of ghosts. Prior to Lewis' death, the two made a pact: whoever died first would return, as a spirit, to prove the afterlife existed. But what Maureen seeks is not some kind of profound, life-affirming sign that would prove a spiritual existence without physical proof, but rather she searches for hard, empirical evidence - a material piece of proof to substantiate the existence of the afterlife, and the ongoing existence of her twin brother within it. The crux of the issue is, however, that if spirits were to exist (the audience do get confirmation fairly early that this is the case, but this is not a key plot point) we certainly cannot perceive them with our own senses - there are limits to human perception, like seeing certain colours or not being able to hear a dog whistle. Hence the need for a medium, who has the capacity to exceed this limit in some way. These two things reach a crossroads since material existence cannot be proven to the average individual without the capacity to perceive that existence in some bodily way - if we cannot hear it or see it or touch it then can we necessarily accept it as a reality?

The film then embarks upon a series of intermingling, genre-diverting stories and plots which go on to prove the value of this inbetween, the spiritual (thinking more of personal religious belief rather than substantiating the existence of ghosts) acceptance that can arise when not endlessly searching for a definitive answer. The ambiguity of the mysterious stalker texting Maureen and their long and dwindling anonymous conversations highlight the growing to and fro of this contrast between the material and the immaterial, and the need to reach acceptance by letting go of the search for evidence. The use of the mystery sender of the messages constantly shifts between the obvious iMessage and iPhone branding, a material object, and looms into a shadowy figure who could be a creep or could be a spiritual being by keeping communication remote and mysterious, a characteristic that texting lends itself to well. As Stewart has described herself in an interview for V Magazine:

“When you speak to someone on the phone, that is a decipherable, understandable exchange. But with text and social media, it’s essentially a dialogue with yourself and your interpretation of a shadow.”

It is only after this stalker via text storyline culminates in horrific material and visceral reality that Maureen can begin to accept the realities of the world - the immaterial and the spiritual, that loss of definitive answers and evidence, is what will grant her peace. And this can only achieved by ceasing to look for proof, to stop engaging in the 'dialogue with yourself and your interpretation of a shadow', and to instead move beyond those ties to the materiality of it all. Instead of seeking the physical facts of designer clothing, of the iPhone, of some measurable sign of her brothers spiritual existence in the afterlife, Maureen needs to escape these pressures of hard fact, and seek a more emotive, spiritual, transitional kind of attitude to life. Rather than definitive proof of existence or a lack thereof, she has to embrace shades of grey.

It is only when she does this that spiritual connection really arises. Sat in the garden with her back turned to her deceased brother's kitchen, Maureen misses the proof that the audience gets to see. In the kitchen window and across to the open doorway a mug is lifted by a man not established as a living presence within the house, that then transforms into a floating mug which shatters on the floor moments later. Oblivious to the substantiation of the afterlife behind her, Maureen clears up the shattered mug, leaves the house and moves on. It is only later when she travels to Oman to spend some time with her friend or boyfriend or goodness knows who that she herself can begin to accept a more ambiguous world.

Maureen is oblivious to the spiritual mischief about to happen behind her

The location of Oman lends itself to this depiction of spiritual, ambiguous and transitional existence, as a seemingly exotic world filled with sunlight, ancient buildings and a 'simple' life, without the clutter of Parisian existence or the smog filling the streets, works as a kind of Paradise or heaven. This in turn suggests a greater receptiveness to the spiritual world on Maureen's part and where she finally gets the connection she wanted - or to some extent, at least. 

In places, Personal Shopper drags on. Texting has yet to become the most scintillating thing to watch on the big screen, and significant portions of the film are built out of text messages, Skype calls and other technological experiments. Though they work well, at times you wonder why exactly you've paid to watch Kristen Stewart's thumbs in the lead role instead of her face. That said, when Stewart's face is present for audiences, she amazes, as do many of the shots constructed within the film and the beautiful garments placed within the closet of Maureen's boss. 

For anyone expecting an indie horror film from Personal Shopper: this is not the film for you. For anyone expecting a fashion film a la The Devil Wears Prada: this is not the film for you. For anyone expecting Personal Shopper to be a murder mystery, or a coming-of-age movie, or a psychological thriller: this is not the film for you. Personal Shopper seems to very much live by its own rules, shifting between each of these genres and styles and back again, never settling on one definitive path and constantly occupying the inbetween, the shades of grey.