French films leave many questions unanswered, while many American movies leave just one big question – think Inception. When there’s lots of questions there’s really less in the film, each question matters not so much. In these movies less is clarified, less is offered up. They just seem smaller.
Most of Oliver Assayas’ films sort of fit this general French pattern, but some still cram in a whole lot. In Demon Lover: Japanese porn, globalism, corporate back-stabbing, health crises, the internet, torture. In Personal Shopper: mediums and seances, envy and lust, shame and lust, the awkwardness death leaves behind, actual ghosts, Oman, Paris, fashion week, texting (lots). In Non-fiction: fertility, cheating, the ascendance of electronic media, ambitious careerism, the dying publishing industry, vacation. Non-fiction and Demon Lover are more like think pieces than novels. Of course they don’t have or make arguments, but they hint at them. Non-fiction half-heartedly laments the dying publishing industry, but is really about the relationships of the characters. This is a good trick. Personal Shopper is far from these other two in that it doesn’t come close to making an argument. Not even a disguised one.
I just watched Personal Shopper and I liked the movie but it didn’t seem to fit together. There were many unanswered questions, but those questions didn’t seem to justify their presence, why they were there and what they had to do with each other. There’s a character who sends mysterious texts - and then is just the guy you thought it was. Or maybe not. There are actual ghosts. Why? The end is ambiguous - but like many French movies, there never was an expectation of resolution, anyways, so, so what. I felt like the gaps in the movie seemed useless, but didn’t know if that implied that the movie didn’t work. This is comforting, in a way, the only stakes seemed to be - this is a work of art, does it work? – and not, will Han Solo die. There seemed to be a feeling or a sense or an idea of what Personal Shopper is as a whole, one that I was striving towards while watching the movie, that the movie pointed at. All the unanswered questions the move left separate it into one mysterious thing, to think about, to watch, but at the same time leave it fragmented in many pieces.
Perhaps I should flip my thinking, if I liked the movie, but it didn’t seem to fit together, well, maybe a liked it because it didn’t fit together. And if that’s how the movie works, then maybe it does fit together. Perhaps unity comes down to the question: does it work, or does it not? Maybe this is lazy thinking, but the vagueness comes from the fact that artworks can be infinitely clever in doing whatever it is that we decide artworks do. Certainly a movie that doesn’t really fit together may still “work.” I think personal shopper is like this, because it kept me hooked, and now writing about it. There’s still something that it is that I want to grasp towards. Maybe the point of the movie is precisely that it does not fit together. The juxtaposition in the movie of such disparate things - ghosts, high-fashion, Middle East software contracts - is something else than the parts and their common connection (Kristen Stewart). Fragmentation is the point, the driver of the movie, it’s what the movie seems to play with. But if fragmentation is the point of the movie, then in a way there is unity in the artwork. It is unified, in being fragmented. The unity is the unity in the purpose of the director – to bewilder –, the texture of each temporal section of the movie - split into parts - and the isolation of each theme - as unrelated as possible. Importantly, I think the movie could fall apart with just one or two artistic mistake, say, bad filmography, and then the fragments wouldn’t just be fragmented, but would be irredeemably so.
Perhaps the presence of unity is more essential to a fragmented artwork, than one carefully structured. This paradox seems to me to suggest that the quality of unity is more important to an artwork than any other. It’s something that the artwork can play with, within itself, and can find pretty much anywhere, but is also the quality upon which the success of the work, as a whole, depends.
–––––––––––––––––––––
July 18th, 2023.
New York, New York.