The Furniture: Framing the Unseen in Personal Shopper

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Personal Shopper is a film about ghosts, and where to find them. Maureen (Kristen Stewart) is a bereaved twin, waiting in Paris for a sign from her recently deceased brother, Lewis. But it doesn’t come easy, not in the least bit due to some unpleasant cross-currents in her professional life. She acquires clothes and accessories for Kyra (Nora von Waldstatten), a celebrity who has an irritating penchant for holding onto things she was meant to return. Maureen jets across the city and rockets under the English Channel on her behalf, toting jewelry boxes and garment bags.

All of which is to say that the material of this film is transient and fleeting, the inevitable intangibility of the personal shopper’s trade. And, of course, it is also about the translucent transience of ghosts, especially ghosts that struggle to make contact. Olivier Assayas has created a layered projection of Maureen’s psychology that refuses her the simple clarity of the mirror. Instead, she seeks her brother and herself in all of the wrong places, only slowly understanding the nature of presence.

This shifting, unseen process takes place against a perfectly arranged backdrop of meticulously decorated spaces. Production designer François-Renaud Labarthe, who has worked with Assayas since 1986’s Disorder, and set decorator Martin Kurel, who won a César last year for Marguerite, have done great work. It begins in the house where Lewis had been living. Maureen looks there for a spiritual presence, both for herself and on behalf of a couple of interested buyers. It’s dark and nearly empty. The only furniture left is that which is presumably too big to easily remove.

It holds many suggestions, but no answers. The vaguely sketched cross on this wall might be a warning or a signpost, but it leads nowhere. It simply lurks.

The house itself isn’t the key to any riddle. Rather, it becomes a spiritual and psychological conduit, through which Maureen begins to process her situation. Its recurring doorways suggest portals into the other world, or into the mind.

This becomes clearer as Maureen sketches them. Her shading suggests the darkness of her difficult nights in the house. What sits beyond them, however, remain undefined.

Though it’s never quite explicitly stated, these drawings are likely influenced by Maureen’s encounter with the work of Hilma af Klint. This turn-of-the-century Danish artist painted images that emerged from her participation in seances, figures inspired by communication with the dead. These abstract works predate even those of Wassily Kandinsky. Maureen watches an introduction to af Klint on her phone.

Maureen believes she can only make contact with Lewis by staying in Paris, where he died. And when the texting starts, it begins to seem as if she may have been right. Yet the visual language of the film never quite endorses it. The house, where she seems to come closest to breaking through, is a place of empty rooms and open doors. The rest of her life, meanwhile, is incredibly cluttered. Kyra’s apartment is overwhelmed with furniture, decor and pictures of herself.

Maureen’s apartment is equally cluttered, busy and constricting.

It gradually becomes clear that the physical location is not the important thing. Rather, it is the presence of mind and the internal relationship with memory and creativity. Lewis’s bereaved girlfriend, Lara, works toward peace through her woodworking. Her workspace is full of ornate knobs and blocks, her craft a careful and delicate one.

And so Maureen, like both Lara and Hilma af Klint, must craft her grief into something personally truthful, perhaps even abstract. She will not find it in the Paris of Lewis’s death because her own Paris is far too busy and accessorized. Leaving is part of the solution, though the destination itself seems equally immaterial. The truth that comes in the final scene has little to do with Oman. Rather it has everything to do with Maureen’s own relation to the immediate space around her, the light in the room and the camera, suddenly present. The design, by simplifying and negating itself, has ushered in a new ending.

Comments

[cal roth]

When I read the title I thought you were going to talk about the train. I think somebody should write about the symbolism of grief and mourning and death in trains in both this and Almodóvar's Julieta.

In Julieta we experience Death itself; in Personal Shopper the train shelters a moment in which we're led to beliefe death is not the end of life. That's the great hope of Julieta, overcome tge death of her sister who's still alive, a very Almodóvarian theme (in Talk to Her, the dead life in coma; in Live Flesh, in prison; in Broken Embraces, the dead woman survives in a butchered movie; in Volver, the dead mother is a ghost - Death to Almodóvar can be reverted because it's very close to alienation from the people we love).

That's the big pain of Personal Shopper. Death may not end strong ties, but alienate us from the people we love, even if we can contact them. That's even more enerving than the idea of a death that ends everything. It equals torture, to be separated from the people we love when they still have a form of existence.

To Assayas, it's the afterlife. To Almodóvar, it's the mere distance.

[Charlie]

Thank you for this article, and thanks cal for.your comment, on a film that's been quite overlooked.