It’s hard to pin down just what the film is definitively trying to say, or indeed even what really happens in its plot. That inquest yields fascinating, frightening results, a portrait of a world in which there is little difference between the virtual and the supernatural. Using its centered and committed lead actress, Kristen Stewart, as its chief investigator, Personal Shopper examines the potential for horror-both banal and gothic-lurking in everyday technology, in the ways we use it to both connect and detach. Re-watching it this year (upon its release in the U.S.), I was more captivated by the sharp, nervy sophistication of its oddball filmmaking.
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The loss referenced in Olivier Assayas’s mysterious movie seemed almost directly related to something that happened in my own life. When I first saw Personal Shopper at Cannes in 2016, it was an intensely personal experience. The kind that can-like this little jewel of a movie-transport, uplift, and humbly inspire. Princess Cyd is also a soft-spoken coming-out film, a loving and subtle tribute to Chicago, and, in one sequence that should be corny but somehow isn’t, an earnest appreciation of good literature. How heartening to see big topics-like faith, like sexuality-discussed in such warm, considerate terms by two such gifted actresses. (Where the heck has she been hiding? Someone give her the Carrie Coon treatment-if she wants it.) Princess Cyd is a fluid, contemplative look at exchange, at two people learning things from one another, as Cyd and her aunt negotiate a relationship around differences of age, ideology, and experience. Pinnick plays the title character, a teenage girl with a tragic past who travels to Chicago to spend a few summer weeks with her aunt, a celebrated novelist and academic with an active religious life, played with abounding grace and intelligence by Spence. Yet Cone, quietly asserting himself as a major talent, more than pulls it off, with the immeasurable help of his two lead actresses: Jessie Pinnick and the remarkable Rebecca Spence. It’s a story of family connection and self-realization that’s never cloying or preachy, which is hard to do. Princess CydĪs kind a movie as there was this year, writer-director Stephen Cone’s tiny, deeply felt character study is modest, thoughtful, and decent. I’ve never seen a movie quite like it, and I don’t know that I will again before all this is over and I’ve moved on to wherever it is we go next. Instead, the film is insisting and clarifying, a hand held out in support, in mutual fear and awe and confusion. Yet as he also showed in his wonderful Disney family film Pete’s Dragon, Lowery has a generosity of spirit that rescues A Ghost Story from being an outright bummer. There’s something terrifying about Lowery’s vision, how (with the help of Daniel Hart’s enveloping soundtrack) it captures the vast, howling churn of the universe swallowing up and forgetting one lonely soul, like it will someday do to us. Intimate and expansive, A Ghost Story follows, well, a ghost-white sheet with eye holes cut out and all-as it lingers in its former home, new owners coming and going, time relentlessly passing. A Ghost StoryĪnyone who’s ever lain awake at night, contemplating mortality-so, I’d think pretty much everyone-should find something validating in David Lowery’s experimental wonder of a film. The film’s most piercingly telling, damning observation is that it’s the lone woman of color in the room, struggling against an implacable enemy, who’s the only one doing the trying. Either way, it’s good to see someone try. There may be some relief in seeing Beatriz go to bat for us, but, as the film argues, we all still may go down swinging in the end, toppling into the abyss. A caveat: Beatriz at Dinner does not aim to comfort. White’s script is a boldly downbeat descent, given poetic body by Arteta’s watchful, gentle filmmaking. Hayek’s is an earthy, aching performance-one of the best of the year-that’s complemented well by John Lithgow as the opposition, and Connie Britton and Chloë Sevigny as other witless guests. As played by Salma Hayek, zen-calm massage therapist Beatriz is a vessel of collective outrage while also maintaining her individuality, a keenly wrought sense of self. And yet, it’s also cathartically bruising to watch the film’s title character hurl her disgust at a Trumpian billionaire when they wind up, through a mundane twist of fate, at the same nightmarish dinner party. As a biting and ultimately devastating plaint about an economic system grown sociopathically rapacious with greed, it’s almost too much to bear. Director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White’s latest collaboration premiered at Sundance in the shell-shocked first days after the presidential inauguration, giving the film an eerie timeliness.
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