I wish this didn’t need to be reiterated, but the fact
remains: Twilight is long since over and done with. Everyone attached to those
films has long since moved on to (mostly) better things far removed from it.
However, even with that said, I keep getting the feeling that people aren’t
giving Kristen Stewart, the most memorable part of those films for all the
wrong reasons, her fair due. Maybe it’s because, in the dungeons of comment
sections and web forums, jokes about Bella’s utter uselessness and unintentionally
malicious behaviour still ring out. That association is hard to break, even if
you’re fortunate enough to unironically like those films.
The shame in that
sentiment furthers once you realise that, since 2012, Stewart has not only kept
fairly busy but also done some genuinely fantastic work like with American Ultra and Clouds Of Sils Maria. It’s hardly a surprise that this film, written
and directed by the man behind Clouds and who got Stewart to give one of her
best performances to date, would be on my radar. But does it continue her
winning streak (ignoring that Billy Lynn ever happened) or does it add a chink to the chain?
The plot: By day, Maureen (Kristen Stewart) works as a
personal shopper for wealthy actress Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten). By night, she
works as a medium as she, much like her deceased twin brother, has the ability
to communicate with the dead. However, when she gets contacted by a spirit that
she can’t identify, it seems that her otherwise passive life is about to take a
drastic turn.
Writer/director Olivier Assayas wrote this film specifically
for Kristen Stewart and that is quite evident in a number of respects. For a
start, it’s essentially her story and we spend almost all of the film focusing
on just her, resulting in the rest of the cast feeling like window dressing in
most scenes. For another, this is the kind of performance that only comes about
through a combination of an actor and a director who know precisely what each
other is capable of. As a result, this is easily Stewart’s single best
performance to date and bear in mind this is coming from someone who has been
watching her post-Twilight career with great interest because, quite frankly, I
always knew that she was capable of something this incredible.
Never mind how
she manages to take a character whose main attribute is her lack of agency and
imbue it with so much energy that I’m starting to wonder how this isn’t the version of Bella that we
ended up getting. Where she shines the most is when Maureen is at her shakiest
and most struck by the events around her; the way she delivers her stutters and
very nervous disposition is about as true to life as you can get without just
pulling someone off the street.
It seems that Stewart and Assayas’ past chemistry is intact
behind the camera as well, seeing as this is just as heavily layered in its
writing as Clouds Of Sils Maria. It carries the same intent of character
exploration as Clouds, except here it’s a lot more insular and keeps its
general themes on a more grounded level. Maureen’s character is remarkably well
established right from the offset, showing her as someone who essentially
exists just to serve other people. Whether it’s the whims of her employer as a personal
shopper or trying to connect with spirits as a medium, she is shown as passive
and lacking in any real immediacy with her own life and ambitions.
Through
this, the film serves as a person’s search for their own identity that isn’t
stapled onto the movements of others, even those that have departed from this
world, and the end result is honestly rather gripping. This manifests itself in
a lot of long takes of Maureen walking through rooms and just… existing, and
that in and of itself is rather gripping. I usually have a real disdain for
films that try and make the lack of action notable because something actually
interesting could happen at any moment, but here, it honestly feels warranted.
These scenes, particularly when she’s on her own on a train, gives a sense of
how empty her life is and how little real
contact she has with other people.
Given how this is a ghost story, what kind of ghost story is it? Is it the standard fare where the drama
hinges on how the supernatural interact with the living characters? Is it a
more Guillermo Del Toro-style affair where it’s a dramatic story that just
happens to have ghosts in it? Well, it’s a bit of both. Maureen herself is
shown as a rather passive medium in how she treats ghosts with the same level of
enthusiasm (read: little to none) as her day job and, quite frankly, her
disconnection with her gifts ends up playing a large part in her arc come
film’s end.
However, the way that medium and spirituality is weaved into the
story fits right in with Assayas’ very thickly layered mode of scripting. Early
on, we see Maureen showing interest in a deceased painter who, along with being
ahead of her time in terms of style, also had it in her will that her work be
kept hidden until twenty years after her death. Given how notions of unfinished
business and people only getting attention after they are able to engage with
it are old-school staples of ghost stories, this lends some nice subtextual
touches to the film that will surely benefit people who like obsessively read
into how films are written. You can see why I like it, I’m sure.
There’s also a
showing of how spirituality has changed along with the rest of the world in
terms of technology, resulting in scenes of Maureen communicating with the dead
in rather mundane ways. Knowing how even more recent films involving ghosts
usually stick with the antiquated forms of communication, it’s quite refreshing
to see a more contemporary spin on the idea.
Unfortunately, this film isn’t all good and its faults are actually rather glaring. For one,
Assayas seems to have a fetish for fades-to-black because every other scene
ends with one, making the audience feel like they’re drifting in and out of
consciousness. Given how I’ve seen the words “dull” and “pretentious” attached
to this film by other critics, I’m willing to bet that that has something to do
with it. There’s also somewhat of a problem when it comes to how the
supernatural element plays into Maureen’s progression as a character, largely
through a series of text exchanges. Now, on one hand, it fits with the story as
it ends up being the first step towards Maureen coming into her own as an
individual. On the other hand, once we start getting what this film seems to
think are definite answers on the mysteries in the plot, it starts to fall
apart in terms of making sense. Honestly, it’s the same issue I had with the
ending to Clouds in how it, all of a sudden, goes down a more abstract route
that the rest of the film seemed to avoid.
Now, while the actual conclusion
here is definitely more satisfying, it does suffer a lot more from the “didn’t
see this coming, did you?” mode of writing that starts to make things feel a
bit pointless before too long. It keeps dropping these little moments that you
would think would be leading to something, especially with how she ends up
embroiled in a murder mystery for barely half an act of the film, but it all
gets hand-waved away at the end in a moment that genuinely makes me think that
there is a big chunk of the script missing. After seeing how well the film’s
writing can get during the rest of it, it’s frankly embarrassing that all of
that just gets shuffled away and off-screen at that, culminating in just a
single line of dialogue to explain everything. It’s rare that I’ll cover a film
that is putting in all of the effort and none
of the effort at the exact same time.
All in all, for better and for worse, this is exactly the
kind of film I was expecting from the people who gave us Clouds Of Sils Maria.
It’s incredibly well-acted, with Kristen Stewart giving a career high-mark
performance, the writing is thick with subtext that will definitely appeal to
the in-depth audiences out there and the way it handles its subject matter,
both as a character study and as a
depiction of mediumship, is wonky in places but still shows a lot of thought
and care for the most part. That said, it also suffers from the same
badly-handled attempt at concluding the story which ends up detracting from the
film’s worth as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment