The supernatural drama Personal Shopper—writer-director Olivier Assayas’s second collaboration with Kristen Stewart, after 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria—takes place in the most alluring precincts of Paris but concerns, at its heart, what lies beneath the surface of everyday life. A fashion assistant to an image-obsessed celebrity, Stewart’s Maureen spends her spare time cultivating the spiritual receptivity of a medium, as she searches for a sign, however cryptic, from her recently deceased twin brother. In showing his lonely and grief-stricken protagonist conducting many of her day-to-day interactions through screens—Skyping with her boyfriend in far-off Oman, for instance, and carrying on a sinister and teasing text exchange with a party who remains unidentified but seems apprised of her movements—Assayas draws a parallel between technology’s uncanny ability to conjure disembodied presences and Maureen’s fleeting contacts with the spiritual realm. In the video above, an excerpt from an interview piece on our new edition of Personal Shopper, the filmmaker discusses the role played by digital communication in the movie, and how the “open space of the internet” has destabilized the traditional boundaries between the material world and the realm of the mind.
from The Criterion Current http://ift.tt/2hcoMwp
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