Personal Shopper

Kristen Stewart has long specialized in charismatically rendering distraction. In “Certain Women” she used shoveling a diner plate full of food into her mouth to signal how she’d rather be anywhere than where she was, and all the way back to “Adventureland” she moved through a rundown amusement park, and her whole life really, with the attitude of someone waiting to be beamed up to wherever else she was supposed to be. And in “Personal Shopper”, writer/director Olivier Assayas harnesses that distraction for its greatest good yet, building around Stewart something like a ghost story that is at once literal and metaphorical. It is, however, neither Ghost Chasers nor intelligentsia slush, but something weirdly, wonderfully moving, particularly in how Stewart moves not so much through a fallen world as through a normal world that, through her eyes, may as well be fallen anyway. Indeed, when someone asks Stewart’s Maureen what she is doing in Paris, Maureen replies: “Waiting.” That’s what “Personal Shopper” feels like – like someone waiting for something to start.

In a genuine sense, Maureen is. Her brother Louis died not long before the movie opens, from a heart defect, the same one plaguing Maureen, meaning it’s possible she could go anytime too. And because Louis was a medium, brother and sister made a pact that if he died he would send a signal from beyond the grave to let her know there was, in fact, something in the great beyond. Her paranormality, however, is less professional than personal, and to make ends meet she works as a personal shopper for some vaguely defined celebrity named Katya (Nora Waldstätten) who sends lowly Maureen on errands all over Paris. And even if the camera can occasionally veer into voyeuristic territory during these missions of commerce, Maureen is nevertheless almost always is able to elude its grasp, falling in out and of shots, never allowing us to get a complete fix on her as she never seems to get anywhere except the next haven of designer garb, running in place. This idea is underscored in chats with her boyfriend (Ty Olwin), all of which are conducted by Skype, reinforcing the impersonal distance. We see her sketching in notebooks, but if that’s her passion, she does little with it.

All this might lead you to assume that the haunting in a “Personal Shopper” is of the allgeogrical kind, Maureen as a ghost in her own life, sort of “A Ghost Story” without the white bedsheet. But while that’s true, Assayas is also not being coy; we hear noises in the night, we see fleeting spectral images, something is there. The movie doesn’t just believe in ghosts; it shows us ghosts. Yet, it’s not the spookiness that spooks Maureen. If anything, she wants more of it, which she actually says, demanding from Louis, if it is indeed him, further signs of his presence. If these moments freak us out, they don’t seem to faze her, which have a profound means of settling us down and drawing us in.

Assays improbably brings all these threads together in a mid-movie text exchange that stretches across several scenes in which Maureen begins receiving messages from an unknown number, one teasing her, threatening her, testing her. With little more than a phone, the scroll sound and KStew, Assayas manages to render an extended sequence that, wrapped around Maureen’s voyage from Paris to the countryside, becomes as thrilling as Jason Bourne guiding the journalist through Waterloo Station in “The Bourne Ultimatum”, a chase scene, of sorts, down the information superhighway, equally tantalizing and terrifying. Who exactly is on the other end you never quite know even if you have an idea, but the answer never matches the question – never matches the moment. And that’s fine. This sequence, taken in tandem with others, where she watches iPhone videos, all underscore her sense of isolation and search for connection through the digital realm.

The voice on the other end tempts her to try on Katya’s clothes, which she does, as she occasionally does elsewhere, and if there are moments in the movie where Stewart lets Maureen’s distraction fall away, it’s here. In these sequences, she comes alive in a palpable way, slipping into someone else’s skin as a means to commune with the world in a way she can’t otherwise seem to achieve. Whether she ultimately finds the means to slip this fog, I’ll leave for you to discover, though the film’s unique parts might well tip its enigmatic concluding hand. And if this ending will elicit questions, it nevertheless feels emotionally, if not spiritually (secularly?), complete. If Assayas stresses Maureen’s loneliness throughout, this is still as lonely as she ever looks, sending a question out into the cosmos that only bounces right back.

Camp X-Ray

Set in the infamous detainee camp of Guantanamo Bay, “Camp X Ray” is designed as something of a monotonous slog. New to the joint, Pvt. Amy Cole (Kristen Stewart) is immediately indoctrinated to its grimly repetitive procedures, and watching as she buzzes her way through a series of same-looking security doors is like going down the rabbit hole of mindless procedure. True, some of the detainees are often riled up, screaming, psycho-screwing with the MP’s and even hurling bags of you-don’t-want-to-know-what; yet just as often the film deliberately rubs our faces in the mundane. Its closing credits sequence features simple footage of Guantanamo guards making their endless, circular rounds, over and over, on and on into infinity. It’s a drab, unloving environment where the MP’s can’t wear name tags, stripping them of personal identity, and purposely refraining from niceties with those in their charge. This works to allow those few occasional pockets of humanistic sunshine that inevitably shine on down to feel like a legit hallelujahs. 

The story turns on Amy’s relationship with Ali (Peyman Moaadi). Encountering him on her rounds, he forces conversation on her, provokes her, tests her, and eventually senses a glimmer of compassion, causing him to engage her on an emotional level that nonetheless remains tinged with suspicion. And even if an obligatorily tentative mutual respect emerges between them, in many ways, they remain at odds, and how could they not? No one particularly wants to be here, not the detainees, not the MP’s, not the commanding officers. Amy’s superior sullenly declares he hates Guantanamo and is only there because he was ordered, just as Amy was ordered, and on down the line. The detainees, of course, have been ordered here too, against their will, and now everyone is forced is forced to play what essentially amounts to a waiting game where they aren’t really waiting for anything.

They are all prisoners, in other words, and occasionally the film gets too aggressive in its evincing of this fact, like the on-the-nose back-to-back shots that show Amy first, then Ali, sitting on their bunks, eating and reading. And it also goes to expected lengths to question who “the real enemy” is by transforming Amy’s supervisor into someone of questionable moral merit, coming onto Amy, then turning on her when she rejects him.

“Camp X Ray” mostly evades politics, and the few times it does deign to raise them, it does so with an almost ridiculously simple temperament, prompting Amy to say things like “It’s just not as black and white as they said it was gonna be.” What brought Ali here is never discussed. Though the opening scene in which he is nabbed shows him with a table full of mobile phones suggests something is up, there is no follow through. Ali claims his innocence, but we are given no evidence of exactly why this would be and neither is Amy.

Though the rushed conclusion is too determined to traffic in sentimentality, something real is forged between these characters regardless, and that something subtly comes alive in the performance of Stewart who, between bouts of order-giving terseness, skillfully lets her character’s curiosity peek out. She isn’t concerned with his guilt or innocence and this doesn’t become a quest for justice; this is a quest for empathy.

Clouds of Sils Maria

The first shot of “Clouds of Sils Maria” finds Val, short for Valentine (Kristen Stewart), aboard a Eurorail, the camera shaking. Well, actually the camera is still; the train is causing the camera to shake. And this shaking ominously suggests a forthcoming shake-up in whatever movie world this is we are about to enter. Indeed, Val is the personal assistant of Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a famed actress on her way to a celebration honoring the writer, William Melchior, who helped trigger her upward professional trajectory. Alas, they learn Melchior has died, and he would probably be gleeful to learn his own death functions in the context of “Clouds of Sils Maria” as mere symbolism, the portent of our leading lady’s doom. A celebration becomes a memorial.

That memorial takes fairly overt form in a revival of the play that twenty-some years ago put Maria a on the map wherein she rivetingly played the part of a youthful ingénue in a complicated starry-eyed relationship with an older actress. Now, of course, the director wants Maria to reverse roles. Her former part will be played by JoAnn, a rising American star prone to fits of volatile public hysteria, played exquisitely by Chloe Grace Moretz with a kind of European art house spin on the Miley Cyrus phenomenon. She is fresh off some ginormous if vapid sci-fi flick and now embroiled in scandal as the other woman in an affair with an English writer who, frankly, doesn’t seem like he can keep up with her. Come to think of it, JoAnn more than a little resembles the off screen travails, fair or not (not), of one Kristen Stewart. You half expect that she will encounter the Kristen Stewart of “Twilight” in some sort of perverted cinematic séance.

It’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when reality, the old curmudgeonly term of the movie reviewing lexicon, departs “Clouds of Sils Marias.” When Val runs lines with Maria, director Olivier Assayas often enters the moment mid-rehearsal, with scripts tucked out of sight, a disorienting effect that means we can’t be certain if they are merely reciting dialogue or legitimately having a row, and therefore effectively eliciting a sensation of being both. Veracity blends with fiction, which is the eerie, wonderful plain on which this whole dreamy movie rests. After all, art, as Val lectures her employer, is an “interpretation of life that can be truer than life itself”, a line worthy of eye-rolls until you hear the way Ms. Stewart says it, with so much earnestness that it counteracts the naivety. “Clouds of Sils Maria” may be sentient but it never devolves into self-impressed self-awareness.

As with any film concerning the acting industry, “Clouds of Sils Marias” invites comparisons to the grand dame of showbiz satires “All About Eve”, even if they are far from the same film. That was a backstage drama dipped in battery acid, a schemer conniving to crush a starlet, the perpetual cycle of the performer. The fall from grace here, however, is inevitable rather than accelerated, a piercing and gloriously puzzling portrait of an actress’s careers suddenly becoming enveloped in the fog of age, emblemized quite insistently, but no less breathlessly, by the clouds of the title, the so-called Majola Snake, a kind of smoke ring that pours through the canyons of the Swiss Alps where they are hiding out.

Considering that Maria has re-ascended the stage in the wake of dressing up for a superhero movie, her character bears hallmarks of Michael Keaton’s Riggan Thompson, the focal point of last year’s Academy Award winning “Birdman.” Yet that was a film heightened to the point of grandiosity. Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), called him on the carpet, yes, to try provide counterweight to the opening shot of his levitation and all that sleight-of-hand (or not) entailed. Yet the film’s final shot seemed to suggest she believed he could fly, giving over to the illusion of the movie star, a deliberate sacrificing of the film’s final thread of tangibility. Val, however, is and remains the emotional and professional ballast of Maria, counseling and coddling her employer to remain in the play when she wants out. Val sees value in attacking the same work from a different vantage point, to opening one’s self up to another reading, to using art as a kind of working through, and when something happens to Val toward the second act's end, it intentionally feels as if that working-through has become unmoored.

The push & pull between these two women winds up as the film’s prominent feature, the question of who’s wisest being blurred. When Val proclaims that a performance in a dunderheaded Hollywood blockbuster can carry just as much spiritual weight as a hoity-toity art film, it’s incredible to witness not only for the way in which this hoity-toity art film is going to bat for dunderheaded Hollywood blockbusters, but for the zealous optimism with which Val professes it. In the end, it’s not simply the years that have been automatically stripped from Maria, it’s the ideals, and the idea that we accumulate wisdom with age disappears like the landscape to the Majola Snake.

Still Alice

Alice Howland (Julianne Moore), not even fifty years old, has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Once a decorated linguistics professor at Columbia University, she is asked to give a speech at an annual Dementia Care Conference. Her state of mind, however, requires her to recite it page by careful page, highlighting what she has already said to ensure she maintains her place. Things are going swimmingly, until the pages fall from the lectern to the floor, and she scrambles to re-gather them, and it all appears poised to go awry. But, it doesn’t. She cracks a joke and keeps on keeping on. It’s commendable, absolutely, but also indicative of “Still Alice” itself, a film that simply will not dare itself to throw away those pages of writerly gadgets, of a carefully charted course, of positive vibrations over pissed off agony, and just let itself and, by extension, its exemplary leading lady run loose. You keep wishing Ms. Moore would discover the maudlin, this-is-how-we-feel-now music score playing on a stereo in the living room and turn it off. “Still Alice” could have been cold water to the face but instead is a fuzzy sweater offering warmth. It doesn’t want to unsettle as its main character slips further and further away; it wants to hold your hand.

Alzheimer’s disease, frankly, terrifies me. I’ve addressed before that notion of being stripped of both cognizance and memories, of creative expression, and the profession of “Still Alice’s” protagonist seems designed to explicitly address that idea. The very first sign of her forthcoming struggle, in fact, occurs during a classroom talk about communication, which wouldn’t be so eye-rolling if the screenplay had any yearning to push this contrast further. But it doesn’t. Her considerable intellect only exists so she can lose it.

What works better is the almost unintentional juxtaposition of a linguistics professor struggling to convey her frustrations with a fine actress in top form made to convey those frustrations non-verbally. “Still Alice” places its star in every single frame and essentially asks her to get across the initial depression of what’s to come and the spiraling confusion of what has happened almost exclusively on her own. In seeing a neurologist, the editing chooses to stay completely on Moore as she answers a rapid-fire series of question with an almost condescending smile, a curl of the lips that says, “This? Happening to me? Ha!” But it is. And the way Moore slowly strips away her initial nature leaves you with a person in the final third that you didn’t necessarily recognize in the first third, one whose cognizant eyes eventually give way to a terrifying vacancy.

When she becomes lost in the family’s beach house in an increasingly desperate bid to remember the location of their bathroom, the close-up of Moore is all we need to grasp the end result, the long shot switch to reveal that she’s wet herself winding up clumsy and unnecessary. She has more gusto, frankly, than the material and the material’s execution will allow, and so does Alec Baldwin.

So nimble at straddling the line between decent and callous, he plays Alice's spouse with an emotional deterioration of his own, struggling to cope with a better half that can no longer keep up with him on an intellectual level, eventually wanting to re-locate them against her wishes. There is a moment when she’s seated off to the side as he converses with his children and he blithely dismisses the idea she can even follow what they’re saying. You can sense Baldwin wanting to push his part even further into selfishness, but the movie always stop short, so much that I can’t help but wonder if there’s something meatier on the editing room floor. He’s clearly the influence on their oldest daughter Anna (Kate Bosworth), a fairly formulaic ice queen, but one with a self-interest that seems a chip off daddy’s block. Both these relationships hint at a fissure in the family as a whole, a fissure the film conspicuously never wants to genuinely address.

That fissure is also glimpsed in the film's most crucial relationship between Alice and her youngest daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart), one that begins rockily when the former criticizes the latter for eschewing college in the name of an uncertain future as an actress. But then, what's life other than a smearing of certainty? Alice is proof. She planned, she studied, she worked, she saved for a bright future, and then that future suddenly became shrouded in fog. When Lydia learns she may have the gene for Alzheimer's, she chooses not to take a test to find out for sure, a symbolic decision that resists advanced plans to to embrace the moment. Stewart beautifully conveys this sentiment because as an actress she's always possessed so much more "There's No Tomorrow" than "This Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life" bullshit.

Julianne Moore is wonderful but you leave the theater wishing "Still Alice" had the same conviction as Kristen Stewart.