THE SCREENING ROOM
FASHION VICTIM: In Personal Shopper, Stewart plays the bereaved assistant of a demanding movie star“
FROM TOP: CAROL BETHUEL; CHARLIE LIGHTNING
IN THE MOVIES of French director Olivier Assayas, connections are made mostly by smartphone and computer. Plane and train tickets are purchased from kiosks, coffee and food from self-serve counters. Dinners are eaten alone in cafés watching documentaries on a phone; train, subway and taxi rides are spent shut of from fellow passengers, thumbing out text messages and awaiting a response. This is the tense lassitude that makes up contemporary life, and no one has proved better at capturing its melancholy seduction than Assayas. In his haunting and haunted new film, Personal Shopper, human contact is so outmoded that the heroine, Kristen Stewart, barely meets the woman she works for.