It was decided early on that Kristen Stewart‘s Princess Diana in Spencer would be campaigned for Best Actress, and I mean before anyone had seen Pablo Larrain‘s film. Once I saw it in Telluride I knew for a fact that it stunk, and was basically a dream-trip, loony-tune Diary of a Mad Princess. Knowing all the while that Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper is easily her best movie ever.
Did Stewart’s “people” even consider promoting her Personal Shopper performance for Best Actress? Of course not. Because your empty-Coke-bottle Academy members never vote for a lead character in a scary movie.
So I feel rather badly for Stewart — she knocked it out of the park almost six years ago and nobody gave enough of a shit. She does a decent job as crazy Diana in the mediocre, mostly-painful-to-sit-through Spencer and people are going “oh, she’s so wonderful!” Because she’s playing the tragic princess.
For me, Personal Shopper deliver the biggest high of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. It left me breathless and even a trembling a bit.
“Assayas taps a wellspring of thought on forms of communication [while drawing] parallels between 19th century drawing room seances and Skype calls. In Personal Shopper, death is just another form of alienation, a physical remove from a person we once knew. Words themselves come under close scrutiny, and Assayas asks if we can ever truly connect with another person if we’re not standing right in front of them and communing fully with the senses. The incessant buzz of a smartphone becomes an attention-grabbing scream from out of the ether.” — Little White Lies’ David Jenkins.
Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, HE’s favorite 2017 film hands down, has opened to largely favorable reviews — currently at 77% on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. A 67% or 71% rating means a modest degree of difficulty, but 77% basically means that a film has been judged as very, very good except for the complaints of naysayers who don’t or can’t get it.
I was blown away in particular by Tony Scott’s beyond-brilliant N.Y. Times review. It’s so on-target and revelatory that I felt spellbound as I read it. Scott doesn’t just understand and accept this immaculate and mesmerizing film; it’s almost as if he wrote or directed it himself and has taken to reviewing to explain it to the pissheads and tomato-throwers.
Kristen Stewart in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper.
The “perpetually displaced nomad set” amid “the drift and mystery of modern life”…yes!
Read it on the Times site or here in its entirety, but this is about as bull’s-eye as it gets:
“Like many other characters in the films of Olivier Assayas, Maureen, a young American woman living in France, belongs to a relatively privileged slice of the international nomad class. The old-fashioned term ‘jet set,’ with its connotations of glamorous indolence, doesn’t quite fit. Mr. Assayas’s world is populated by figures in perpetual transit: actors, corporate executives, terrorists. Their identities have been dissolved by perpetual displacement. We remember their faces (which are often the faces of movie stars), even if we’re not quite sure who they are.
“Maureen, who works as a personal shopper for a spoiled celebrity named Kyra, certainly brushes up against glamour, and occasionally tries on a piece of Kyra’s borrowed couture. But she dwells mostly in a benumbed, stressed-out limbo, in frenzied motion from one nowhere to the next. Her human connections are often mediated by screens. She video-chats with her boyfriend, a tech consultant on assignment in Oman. She exchanges feverish texts with a stranger on a train from Paris to London and back. When asked what she’s doing in Paris, Maureen answers, ‘I’m waiting.’
Personal Shopper director-writer Olivier Assayas, Kristen Stewart following Monday night’s screening at LACMA. Whether Joe & Jane Popcorn choose to see it this weekend or not, Stewart’s performance as the antsy, stressed-out Maureen is her finest ever.
I’ve been looking at King Kong all my life, but I honestly never noticed any tata captures. Until I came upon this last weekend, I mean. Sorry.
Dan Gilroy, Riz Ahmed, Jake Gyllenhaal during filming of Nightcrawler. (Pic stolen from Esquire link.)
HE to Guy Lodge, Richard Lawson, Eric Kohn, Stephanie Zacharek, Peter Bradshaw, Robbie Collin, Tim Grierson, Jake Howell and others who were hugely impressed by Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper: We were all knocked back when it played in Cannes five weeks ago, but a few too many critic friends have since told me “nope, not for me, didn’t care for it,” etc. And yet some of these same naysayers liked or even loved The Conjuring 2, which operates way, way below the level of Assayas’ film. And that, to me, is appalling.
All I can figure is that Personal Shopper is too antsy and schizo for some people. It’s too teasing and darting and inconclusive. It doesn’t behave like other ghost stories, and some just don’t know what to do with it. So they toss it and wash their hands.
Have any of you thought about the schism between admirers and dissers? What are your thoughts? What’s going on here?
There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind about how uniquely chilling and riveting this film is — it’s my second favorite film of the year after Manchester by the Sea — and how stunningly good Stewart’s performance is. And yet two or three days ago Tom Luddy and Julie Huntsinger of the Telluride Film Festival were both telling me how they didn’t care for it. C’mon!
I posted a short “Friends of Personal Shopper” piece in Cannes on 5.17, but here’s a more comprehensive rundown of the best raves:
“Personal Shopper is strange, frightening, and possessed of a dark ribbon of sadness that no champagne gulped down at a post-screening beach party could drown out. There are certain scenes — scored by ominous thuds and whispering wind — that are so frightening that they were, for this wimp, extraordinarily hard to watch. A horror movie with a matte, flat-faced demeanor [and] a grief drama with a shiver of sylphic humor, Personal Shopper is as cathartic as it is terrifying, as knowing and wise about the weirder mechanics of the grieving process as it is utterly confusing.” — Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair.
This morning I happened to watch this beginning-to-end capturing of the Cannes Film Festival press conference for Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, and realized for the first time that I was given a little camera time when I asked my question about 6 and 1/2 minutes in. IFC Films hasn’t announced a domestic release date. The ghost thriller won’t open in France until mid-October.
“[A] captivating, bizarre, tense, fervently preposterous and almost unclassifiable scary movie from Olivier Assayas…a film which delivers the bat-squeak of pure craziness that we long for at Cannes, although at the first screening some very tiresome people continued the festival’s tradition of booing very good films.
“It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date — she stars in a supernatural fashionista-stalker nightmare where the villain could yet be the heroine’s own spiteful id. Is it The Devil Wears Prada meets The Handmaiden (also in Cannes) with a touch of Single White Female?” — The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw.
“How the hell did this movie get made? We pose this question in genuine awe, with absolutely no hint of back-biting consternation. Occasionally it’s a genre movie, then it’s a study of grief, then a satire, then a murder mystery and then a Hitchcockian thriller, and sometimes it manages to be all that and more in the very same moment.
“Assayas taps a wellspring of thought on forms of communication [while drawing] parallels between 19th century drawing room seances and Skype calls. In Personal Shopper, death is just another form of alienation, a physical remove from a person we once knew. Words themselves come under close scrutiny, and Assayas asks if we can ever truly connect with another person if we’re not standing right in front of them and communing fully with the senses. The incessant buzz of a smartphone becomes an attention-grabbing scream from out of the ether.” — Little White Lies’ David Jenkins.
The Pot au Feu (aka The Passion of Doudin Bouffant) could become a major adult-market hit (it’s the greatest foodie flick of the 21st Century) and perhaps a major contender for Best International Feature Oscar, depending on whether or not France officially submits it.
Forgive my prejudiced viewpoint, but I’ve long believed that an IFC Films distribution deal is almost tantamount to a kiss of death. It’s certainly a guarantee that a first-rate, ecstatically reviewed European film will not be vigorously publicized and hooplah-ed. What IFC Films seems to do, in fact, is acquire exciting, critically hailed titles only to bury them.
History tells us that whenever a terrific Cannes movie is acquired by IFC Films, it is (a) never promoted for Oscar consideration (too costly for a cash-strapped distributor) and is (b) always released to low or non-existent buzz several months after the initial Cannes or Venice Film Festival breakout.
They certainly buried Kent Jones‘ Diane (’18) or at least the Best Actress prospects for Mary Kay Place, who won Best Actress trophies from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress. They buried the hell out of Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper, which exploded in Cannes in 2016 only to limp its way to an anemic box-office opening in March 2017. God’s Country, an IFC Films acquisition, whiffed when it opened on 9.12.22. IFC had a nice little charmer in Stephen Frears‘ The Lost King (HE-reviewed on 3.24.23), and it barely made a ripple.
People see what they want to see, of course, but it always seems as if excellent movies under-perform when IFC Films is at the helm.
Will IFC Films (which currently has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating) at least offer to screen The Pot au Feu in Telluride and Toronto? This movie is a hit waiting to happen, at least among over-40 types.
In late '96 (or 25 and 1/2 years ago) Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep was released. Starring Maggie Cheung as herself, it was about a middle-aged French film director (Jean-Pierre Léaud) trying to remake Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires. Now comes Assayas' new Irma Vep, an eight episode miniseries starring Alicia Vikander as a movie star who travels to France to star in a big-budget arthouse film.
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Except the most deserving recipient for the ’21 and ’22 Best Actress Oscar is Penelope Cruz in Pedro’s Parallel Mothers — theres no question about this, nonewhatsoever.
How many GD smarties have Cruz at the top of their lists? Two — Variety‘s Tim Gray and Queerty’s Michael Musto. There should be more. Cruz’s performance is incontestably fuller, richer, tethered to common experience than Stewart’s. Comparing the two isn’t allowed — entirely different leagues.
Stewart’s submission to Spencer‘s concept — Diana was half-mad, besieged by visions and nightmares, lost in her own head — is total and therefore admirable; you could even call what she does mesmerizing. (being a stickler, I can’t apply that term.) But she’s mainly being favored because critics and public alike are still Diana-struck (they all want to curtsy and bow) and because Spencer declares that the royal family members were bloodless ghouls, and this synchs with current wokester views.
Plus there’s Stewart’s LGBTQ profile and her two-decade career besides (plugging away since 2002’s Panic Room, only 31 years old).
Nagging problem: A few brave critics who’ve seen Pablo Larrain’s film have honestly shared what they feel about it. The fact is that Spencer is an oppressive and smothering thing to sit through. It literally gives you a kind of headache. This doesn’t seem to bother Stewart’s supporters, but in the old days (i.e., before 2015) if a movie really stunk then the Oscar chances of this or that performer in said film would be negatively affected. Not so much any more, or so it would seem.
Stewart is a respected actor. She’s been in a few half-decent films (Welcome to the Rileys, Clouds of Sils Maria, The Runaways, Cafe Society) and also made a lot of stinkers. Spencer is one of them. How many truly awesome, artistically approved knockout films has Stewart made in her life? Exactly one — Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper.
13 for Kristen Stewart. 3 for Lady Gaga. 2 for Olivia Colman, 2 for Penelope Cruz, 1 for Jessica Chastain.
One of my favorite scenes in Olivier Assayas‘ Personal Shopper (’16) is when Kristen Stewart, aboard the Paris-to-London chunnel train, begins to receive vaguely creepy text messages from an unknown party. We’re allowed to consider the possibility that Stewart may be texting with her deadbrother — a wonderful thought while it lasts.
The only thing I disliked about this first-rate ghost story, in fact, was Assayas insisting near the end that the mysterious texter was an actual person…no! Personal Shopper was 10 or 15 times more haunting with the brother.
I haven’t seen Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett‘s Scream, but obviously it’s a shameless button-pusher. I can smell it. Sight unseen this 1.14.22 Paramount release isn’t fit to scrape the mud off Stewart’s boots.
My theatrical viewing of Tenet a few weeks ago in a Flagstaff Harkins plex was a great thundering high. Big screen, booming sound, small buttered popcorn, extra-comfy rocking chair, first indoor viewing experience in over six months…mother!
Plus I wasn’t thrown by my all-but-complete inability to understand the particulars. (I’d absorbed the broad concepts in advance.) I knew going in that Tenet would defy understanding in the usual sense. I hate, hate, hate Nolan’s arrogant sound-design schemes. I couldn’t understand Tom Hardy‘s Bane, and I couldn’t understand half of Inception, and Interstellar, which I loathed from the very depths of my soul, was even worse. So I went into Tenet with an attitude of “go ahead, make my day…make it all but impossible to understand…I won’t care.” And I didn’t.
But time and again, as I mentioned in my 9.5.20 review, I was acknowledging that I’d never seen anything quite like this before. Excerpt: “I was smiling quizzically and a few times literally guffawing with pleasure. Tenet is all but impossible to fully ‘understand’ (certainly upon a first viewing, and even after reading the Wikipedia synopsis I was still going ‘wait, what?’) but my eyes, mind and expectations were constantly being challenged and blown. Pleasurably, of course.”
Yesterday Variety‘s Owen Gleibermansummed up this reaction as follows: “The film doesn’t entirely make sense, but that’s okay, because even when it doesn’t it’s such a bravura spectacle of head-spinning awesomeness (or something) that our heads are spun…sort of.” Yup, that was the reaction of Old Flagstaff Jeffie. And that’s what I’ll hang onto until a subtitled Bluray or the subtitled streaming version comes along, and then I’ll derive a whole new level of comprehension.
OG: “By the last act of Tenet, which is a grandiose action battle full of explosions that run backward (the sand funneling down into the earth, because those forces are moving in reverse), you can see that the effects are cool, and the idea is cool, but how the logistics of it all fit together remains barely coherent, which kind of limits the fun.” HE: “Yes, it’s curious and limiting, but I knew going in that Nolan was going to pull the same shit he did before.”
OG: “But what I discovered, to my surprise, is that Tenet, in all its high-toned kinetic quasi-obscurity, completed the alienation of the [oppressive COVID] experience. Rather than offering a great escape from the COVID blues, the movie was perfectly in sync with the COVID blues. Which is exactly what made it the wrong film for this moment.” HE: Disagree. Tenet rescued me from that climate of widespread depression outside the Harkin plex. For two and a half hours, I managed to forget the dull, dispiriting gloom of face masks, social distancing, no indoor restaurants, no flying to Europe, etc.
OG: “No, the reason that people are going to want to go back to the movies is joy. That’s what they want to feel; that’s the feeling that sitting at home can leach away. And Tenet, while marketed as a great escape, is a movie so tangled up in itself that it turned out to be as joyless an experience as the very prospect of going to see a movie during COVID.”