Doors creak, ectoplasm swirls and wind whistles through crumbling mansions in Personal Shopper (Icon, 15), but Olivier Assayas’s sharp, glassy ghost story is no retro Victorian rehash. This tale of grief taking either uncanny or deliriously illusory form amid the walking cyphers of Paris’s celebrity set is quite the most modern vision of a phantom menace in recent memory – one that sees even an instrument as soulless as the iPhone become a potential conduit of spiritual presence.
As bespoke fashion buyer Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tries to blankly continue her life of second-hand privilege in the wake of her twin brother Lewis’s death, uncertain apparitions intervene to shake her out her waking sleepwalk. Is it Lewis? Someone or something else? Or as she enters eerie text-message exchanges with an invisible stalker, is the call simply coming from inside her head? Assayas thrillingly keeps all options open, directing what seems like schlock with silken precision that gradually uncovers a messy tangle of emotional threads. As for Stewart, while wholly unconvincing as someone named Maureen, she’s otherwise coolly astonishing, shuffling terror, desire and disaffection with a single hand from scene to scene.
It’s rare for a film to bounce from UK cinemas to Netflix before heading to DVD. Had I noticed it was streaming, I’d have urged you to catch Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s entirely remarkable Aquarius (Arrow, 18) weeks ago. Now, with this heady cinematic caipirinha of social, sexual and political unrest available on all formats, you’ve no excuse to skip it. No performance last year got less of its due than Sônia Braga’s sensuous but razor-edged career-crowner here. As a boho widow fighting tooth and nail to save her otherwise emptied Recife apartment building from corrupt property developers, she’s as hard and as funny and as sexy as autumn-era Bette Davis – whose own philosophy that “old age ain’t no place for sissies” gets a rigorous workout in Mendonça Filho’s free-flowing but furious film.
Aquarius is obviously a more rousing study of feminist independence than Disney’s blockbusting self-remake Beauty and the Beast (Disney, PG) – the millennial embellishments of which were much vaunted in advance, but mark a timid departure at best from fairytale formula. As expensively upholstered as can be, Bill Condon’s film is a slavishly designed cosplay exercise, a synthetic paean to the wholly undated charms of the landmark 1991 animation that invents no virtues of its own. Even that glorious Ashman-Menken song score is rendered thinner and tinnier here, and not just by a hard-working Emma Watson’s reedy vocals: the entire film is little more than capable karaoke. Still, it’s easily the highest-grossing film of the year, so what do I know?
I fall out of step with my critical peers, meanwhile, on Terence Davies’s embalmed, parasol-twirling Emily Dickinson biopic A Quiet Passion (Thunderbird, 12). Davies, a gifted film-maker who wears his melancholic sensitivities on his sleeve, should have been an ideal soulmate for Dickinson’s yearning, internalised artistry, but this valentine is scuppered by its tone-deaf dabbling in arch, overworked comedy of the faux-Austen school. It belatedly corrects course toward plummeting heartbreak, but an unpoetic stiffness persists.
As you can see, it’s a gratifyingly generous week for female-driven dramas, if not exactly a kind one. Another woman suffers with steely resolve with The Levelling (Peccadillo, 15), an unwelcoming but auspicious debut from British newcomer Hope Dickson Leach that treads some familiar – and squidgily rain-sodden – turf with its rumbling tale of a young trainee vet (Ellie Kendrick) returning to her father’s ailing farm after her brother’s death. Unlike Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, she isn’t literally haunted by her sibling, but something’s off all the same. Dickson Leach bridges rural realism with a streak of classical tragedy.
Weepier and not half as ambitious is Another Mother’s Son (Signature, 12), a second world war tale of doughty home-front pluck, fronted by Jenny Seagrove, that could have been dredged up at any point in the past 70 years. Marion Cotillard, meanwhile, makes a rare error of judgment in Nicole Garcia’s dozy, heavily cologned melodrama From the Land of the Moon (StudioCanal, 15). Playing a spirited French villager forced into a loveless marriage to escape being sectioned, she emotes with all she’s got, but can’t elevate this even to silly-pleasure status.
Back to Netflix, where their latest Sundance-premiered exclusive To the Bone is hardly more fun to watch, but winds up rattling inside you. An unfussy, emotionally acute directorial debut for veteran Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer Marti Noxon, it tackles the grim subject of teen anorexia with an empathetic directness that dodges any maudlin disease-of-the-week pitfalls, and showcases new, nervy complexities in star Lily Collins – as a wasted-away patient on her last treatment, and last shred of hope. For a young audience, it’s the thoughtful, straight-up address this subject has too long needed on film.
