Mr. Sleeman Is Coming

     An Appreciation of K Stew

     I'm an unapologetic admirer of the actress Kristen Stewart, most known for her role as the vampire lover Bella in the Twilight films.  I watched those movies, enjoying enough about them to drink in the whole series.  My enjoyment of Kristen Stewart's work has been ridiculed by others much the same way as my appreciation for Britney Spears has been mocked; by people who also don't know anything substantial about her or her music.  Some people are famous enough to get "known about" even though the "knowers" really don't know shit.

     Since the Twilight series is so associated with teenaged viewers (girls especially), it's not cool, I guess, for a serious adult like myself to enjoy such cinema.  Nevertheless, I got into watching those films a few years ago because I saw Kristen Stewart in Snow White and the Huntsman, a magnificent epic retelling of the familiar story, going back to its dark fairy tale origins.  Not long after that I watched The Runaways, a biopic about the 1970s all female rock band that included Lita Ford on lead guitar, Joan Jett (played in the film by Stewart), and singer Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning).  One of the great rock band movies, The Runaways is a stirring and moving film with excellent music, performances, and acting.  Stewart's portrayal of Joan Jett represents how willing she is to play an unusually wide variety of roles.  In an upcoming version of Charlie's Angels she'll play one of the trio of women working for the mysterious detective agency operator.  She worked in a good adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, was great as a stripper in the deeply moving Welcome to the Rileys with James Gandolfini.  She's appeared in a film about accused ax murderer Lizzie Borden.  She's worked with Woody Allen.  The eclectic nature of her many acting roles (she's only twenty-eight years old) suggests there isn't any type of performance she isn't willing to try.

     Her bravery and her modesty about her abilities, as evidenced in interviews where she often seems embarrassed talking about herself, makes her simultaneously not a very interesting talk show guest, but also someone who seems just concerned about doing her job and who finds the frills of fame to be annoying and ridiculous.

     Her role in Personal Shopper (2016, written and directed by Olivier Assayas) mirrors this quality in Stewart, but in reverse, since her character, Maureen, secretly wants to be someone else, to have the fame and glamor of her boss, a European top model famous enough that she can't go out shopping by herself, so she employs Maureen to do it for her.  Maureen doesn't like her job, finds her boss to be temperamental and insipid, but is also preoccupied with the death of her twin brother, who told her before he died that he would try to contact her from beyond the grave.  

     The film is a ghost story, but a deceptive one.  Maureen lives by her imagination.  Her brother's girlfriend seeks spiritualistic answers to possibly contacting her dead lover.  Maureen has what she believes to be encounters with some kind of ghost, but apparently it's not her brother.  Parallel with this strange thread is the materialistic non-spiritual thread of Maureen's job working for the model, driving her Vespa around Paris in dense traffic to expensive shops and picking out dresses and accessories, lingerie and other things, sometimes trying on the items in the store--she's close to the same size as the model--and getting a hint of what it would be like to feel such garments on her body as a matter of regularity in her life, instead of someone, like a ghost, on the margin of fame.

     She meets the model's German boyfriend, they have a conversation touching on Maureen's obsession with making contact with her dead brother.  Not long after that she begins receiving strange text messages, starting a sequence of texting that goes on for a long chunk of the film, over several days, a device that may not seem cinematic, but is actually done with mounting suspense as Maureen, scared at first, becomes increasingly intrigued as this "ghost" form of communication, which leaves so much room for misunderstanding--hence emojis--comes to dominate her time, distracting her from the quest to connect with her brother.  

     Overall, Maureen is profoundly lonely, friendless (except for her brother's former girlfriend); this emotional condition leads to much of what she experiences in this movie, real or imagined.  

     Every time I see her in a film, Kristen Stewart always puts it across, always, in baseball terms, hits the ball.  This film represents just one of her numerous accomplishments and is worth checking out for many reasons, including the overall spooky story, the Paris setting, and Olivier Assayas' take on doing a kind of horror film, using the genre but not imitating its usual forms.  The suspenseful elements reminded me of Hitchcock's Vertigo.

                                                                            Vic Neptune