Personal Shopper
Image: Photo: Carole Bethuel
Kristen Stewart should have shared top billing with Google and Apple for yet another shameless display of unsubtle product placement by Olivier Assayas (The Clouds of Sils Maria). And the similarities don’t end there: this follow up effort is just as contrived, pointless and rudderless, with characters so flat they can’t be shown in profile.
The endless irrelevant tangents betray the fact that there is no actual plot; there are just flimsy excuses to show a logo and have someone smoke a cigarette (there is a conspicuous degree of gratuitous cigarette smoking in Assayas’ films).
Main character, Maureen Cartwright (Stewart) is a medium who is trying to gain closure after the death of her twin brother by receiving a reassuring message from him. At least, that’s what the promotional blurb says.
Stewart has an inordinate amount of screen time for a single-geared actor with the range of a pair of tweezers. Then again, some critics actually loved it.
★1/2
Reviewed by Rita Bratovich
