FILM REVIEW: PERSONAL SHOPPER

Most supernatural ghost films function to provide visceral scares and thrills to the audience. With Personal Shopper (2016), Olivier Assayas is attempting to create a more cerebral and introspective ghost story, whose function is more to shed light on the psychological aspects of the supernatural realm rather than simply frighten the audience with jump scares. Anchored by a subtly powerful performance from Kristen Stewart, Personal Shopper is an unsettling experience that wants to disturb us more with the human realm rather than spectral apparitions.

In the film, Kristen Stewart plays Kyra, an American personal shopper for a supermodel in Paris. After the recent death of her twin brother from a heart condition, Kyra visits her late brother’s mansion to try to arrange its sale. The buyers of the property are concerned that the mansion may be haunted, so Kyra, who has a lifelong interest in the supernatural realm, decides to investigate the house. After spending a night in the mansion, Kyra may or may not be haunted by a supernatural entity as she tries to go on with her regular life.

Personal Shopper follows Kyra through her daily activities in a detached, observational manner. When Assayas reveals glimpses of what may be a ghostly presence, he does so in a purposefully ambiguous manner to question whether what we are seeing is real or just a figment of Kyra’s imagination. Indeed, as the film progresses, Assayas reveals how Kyra is gradually becoming more and more detached from the real world through the twin factors of her demanding boss and the recent death of her brother, whom she was close to.

Throughout the film, Assayas constantly subverts the viewers’ perception of reality. In one sequence, Kyra starts receiving unusual texts from an unknown person, which plays with her admiration for and jealousy for her boss. The texts are a sort of psychological game to get Kyra to defy the orders of her boss and potentially get her fired from her job. Are the texts from a real person, from the ghostly presence at her brother’s mansion, or just Kyra’s steadily fragmented grasp on her own sanity?

In a traditional supernatural film, we would see explicit manifestations of ghostly figures haunting their victims. But, with Personal Shopper Assayas is more interested in exploring the more mundane everyday life of someone who may or may not be haunted. There are long, quiet scenes of Kyra going about the daily duties of her job as a personal shopper, or getting dressed and undressed to go to sleep. By doing so, Assayas is planting his supernatural story in the most prosaic manner possible so that we are focusing as Kyra as a person rather than as some form of spiritual medium.

Indeed, the very banal nature of the film’s title itself suggests that Assayas wants to strip away all forms of sensationalism in his film. This has been something Assayas has been working towards his whole career— after more technically flashy films like Irma Vep, Demon Lover, and Boarding Gate, Assayas started to ground his films in a more naturalistic manner beginning with Summer Hours. Assayas isn’t interested in making a traditional genre picture. Instead, he wants to use the ghost story genre to tell a grounded story of a few days in the life of a young woman.

Hence, as the title suggests, Assayas is interested more in the personal realm than the supernatural realm. Kyra is not a person who has been haunted by and possibly possessed by a ghost. Rather, she is a traumatized person who is trying to regain hold of her life after the death of her beloved twin brother. Personal Shopper is less about thrilling us with loud scenes of screaming ghosts, and more about us seeing how a person can overcome grief and despair to find comfort and solace.

FILM REVIEW: NON-FICTION

The digital era has increasingly altered traditional ways of creating art, causing a schism between traditionalists and the newer generation of artists. This conflict between the old and the new is explored in Olivier Assayas’ film Non-Fiction (2018), a deft and clever relationship comedy-drama about a group of friends working in the publishing industry. As a filmmaker, Olivier Assayas has been very eclectic, making everything from French New Wave inspired art films like Irma Vep and Demon Lover to epic political thrillers like Carlos. Now, with Non-Fiction, Assayas is paying homage to Eric Rohmer’s comedy of manners, but updating it for the digital age.

Non-Fiction is the story of a struggling writer (Léonard Spiegel, played by Vincent Macaigne) and his strained relationship with his publisher and friend (Alain Danielson, played by Guillaume Canet).  Vincent and Alain are locked in a power struggle about the publication of his latest novel Full Stop, which is intensified by Vincent’s affair with Alain’s wife Selena (Juliette Binoche), who plays a fictional version of herself as a famous aging actress. In the meantime, Vincent is having relationship problems with his own wife Valérie (Nora Hamzawi), who suspects Vincent of having an affair, and Alain is also having an affair with Laure (Christa Théret), a young woman he hires to help bring his publishing company into the digital era.

This complicated series of extra-marital affairs never gets bogged down into soap operatic melodrama. Rather, like the films of Rohmer, Non-Fiction is a bitingly funny exploration of the intricate power dynamics between men and women in and out of love. On this level alone, Non-Fiction succeeds as a realistic portrayal of the complex emotions that accompany every marriage, and the bonds that both threaten to tear relationships apart and bind them together even stronger. 

Unlike an American film, Assayas doesn’t explore infidelity from a purely moral perspective. Instead, Assayas examines how emotions between men and women change over time, and how this can lead them to seek other partners to satisfy their needs. By the end of the film, there is no definitive resolution for the infidelities of the main characters; instead, just like in the real world, things are left unresolved and messy.

As the title itself suggests, Non-Fiction is also about the tenuous nature of truth in the publishing industry. Vincent writes novels that he categorizes as fiction, but at the same time they are clearly autobiographical in nature, as he writes characters and situations that are based of his own convoluted personal life. Also, the relevance of the novel as a written form in the modern era is challenged throughout the film by Laure. She continuously encourages Alain to steer away from publishing novels like the ones which Vincent writes, and focus more on monetizing online forms of writing, such as blogs and content for E-books.

With Non-Fiction, Assayas is asking us to re-evaluate monetary success as an end-all. Should Alain sell out his publishing company to an E-commerce company which will transform it into the digital future which Laure revealed to him, or keep publishing his friend Vincent’s novels? In an era in which the definition of what constitutes literature is constantly changing as a result of digitization and the new demands of E-commerce, how can we as a society preserve traditional novels as an art form?

Alain must choose between cashing in his company’s work to the unnamed tech giant (as symbolized by his extra-marital affair with the digital guru Laure), or preserving his personal relationships with his wife Selena and his friend Vincent. Assayas doesn’t offer an absolute resolution to this dilemma, or any neatly tied up conclusions to Non-Fiction’s various plot strands. Instead, through the story of his characters and their complicated love lives, Assayas suggests that the only thing that does remain constant in the rapidly changing digital era is the genuine love between couples and friends.

FILM REVIEW: A HIDDEN LIFE

Most war films celebrate the heroism of soldiers who fought for their nations, but Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) is about a soldier who does the exact opposite. A Hidden Life is about a German soldier during World War II who refuses to join in the war efforts of the Nazi party. Like Malick’s previous films, A Hidden Life is ultimately an exploration of a man’s search for a deeper spiritual meaning in his life. The soldier in Malick’s film sees the darkness and brutality of Germany’s slide into Nazism, and tries to make sense of it through a deeper connection with God.

A Hidden Life is set in 1940s Germany and based on the true story of the conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner). As the film begins, Franz, Fani and their daughters live an idyllic and peaceful existence on their farm in the village of Radegund. However, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party is still felt in the village, as evidenced by the patriotic Mayor (Karl Markovics) who constantly badgers Franz to join the war effort. Although Franz at first refuses to join the army, he eventually is drafted into the war effort. Franz leaves Radegund to prepare for battle, but he refuses to fight, leading to his imprisonment and torture.

A Hidden Life feels very much like the film that Malick has been working towards his whole career. Malick’s legendary status began in the 1970s when he burst into the cinematic landscape with two astonishingly accomplished films that heralded the arrival of a major talent. Malick then disappeared for almost two decades, and didn’t make another film again until 1999 with his World War II set epic The Thin Red Line. Malick then returned in 2005 with another historical period piece with The New World, followed up by The Tree of Life a few years later.

After The Tree of Life, Malick went on a filmmaking binge, with four films almost back to back from the years 2012 to 2017. Malick’s two previous historical epics The Thin Red Line and The New World were ambitious but flawed films that felt like a director who was re-learning the art of filmmaking after a long absence (indeed, as mentioned before, Malick hadn’t made a film for almost two decades before that point). While there were incredibly crafted scenes of spiritual and visceral beauty in these two films, they also felt meandering and muddled at points. The Tree of Life was a more structured and accomplished work than The Thin Red Line and The New World, but it also contained some jarring thematic detours that didn’t quite gel into an aesthetically coherent whole.

Then, Malick seemingly went off the deep end with his next three films To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song To Song. Malick shot these three films without a script, and by all accounts the productions of the films were scatter shot and without focus. The films themselves were seemingly randomly improvised scenes strung together in post-production by druggy, sleepy voice-overs that sounded like hippies trapped in an endless time warp of the 1960s. While Malick’s usual thematic concerns about the search for God and meaning in a spirituality impoverished world were inherent within these films, they ultimately were too meandering and incoherent to function as satisfying works of art.

With A Hidden Life, Malick finally settled down and created a film with a tightly structured script and shooting schedule, and the result is Malick’s best film in years. In fact, A Hidden Life is as powerful as Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light and Martin Scorsese’s Silence in its portrayal of spiritual struggle. Like these films, A Hidden Life is an emotionally devastating examination of the search for meaning in a cruel and indifferent world. As Franz wrestles with his belief in a higher power while his Nazi captors endlessly torture him, Malick’s film reminds one of St. John of the Cross’ 16th century poem The Dark Night of the Soul.

By basing A Hidden Life on a true story, and setting it in confined locations, Malick is able to focus his skills in a more effective manner than his previously unstructured films. The scenes of religious and spiritual torment no longer feel out of place as they did in To The Wonder, which awkwardly cut back and forth between Javier Bardem’s tormented priest and Ben Affleck’s search to constantly get laid. Indeed, the cumulative impact of Franz’s journey to find God culminates in an emotionally devastating last act.

Malick poetically contrasts the bucolic and pastoral natural beauty of Franz’s village of Radegund with the dark and grimy Nazi prisons where Franz is imprisoned. In this sense, Malick is pointing us forward as a species towards the almost Eden-like existence of Franz and Fran and their peaceful connection with nature (much like how Malick portrayed indigenous tribes in The Thin Red Line and Native Americans in The New World). In a way, Malick’s films function as a time capsule for how we can co-exist peacefully, and A Hidden Life is his purest expression of this. A Hidden Life is not only a portrait of the horrors of Nazi Germany, but also a stirring and powerful reminder of the goodness of the human spirit amidst unspeakable cruelty.