Kristen Stewart Bedazzles Cannes with Two Performances

Kristen Stewart was dubbed the Queen of Cannes by The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw with the one-two punch of Cafe Society and Personal Shopper. Stewart’s work in the Clouds of Sils Maria earned her a Cesar award last year and though many critics in the US also awarded Stewart, she did not crack the industry’s supporting actress nominations. The reviews for both films have been mixed but Stewart has been named as the standout for both.

TIME OUT’s Guy Lodge says this about Stewart in a rare five star review:

Amid all the shifting mirrored surfaces and hazy ambiguities of Olivier Assayas’s bewitching, brazenly unconventional ghost story, this much can be said with certainty: Kristen Stewart has become one hell of an actress. The former ‘Twilight’ star was easily the standout feature of Assayas’s last film, the slightly stilted study of actors ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’, quietly yanking the rug from under the feet of Juliette Binoche. Here, Stewart doesn’t need to steal the film from anyone: she’s in virtually every crisp frame of it, holding the camera’s woozy gaze with her own quizzical, secretive stare and knotted body language.

Her performance is a galvanising human influence on the film, even as her character, introverted American-in-Paris Maureen, seems forever on the verge of voluntary evaporation. An haute couture clothes buyer and general dogsbody to an insufferable A-list celebrity – shades of ‘Sils Maria’, then, though Assayas is on a very different thematic path this time – practising medium Maureen is haunted, in all senses, by the recent death of her twin brother. Stalking his former abode at night seeking a final communication, she encounters a spirit or two – but whose? And are they following her, or are the insidiously instructive, anonymous texts that start invading her phone from another amorphous entity?

Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson writes:

Stewart is not yet an actress of sprawling range, but what she’s able to do in this vein, not so much playing a character as expressively inhabiting a mood, is rather remarkable. Here is a pragmatic, emotionally muted, guarded young woman who is also immeasurably sad—a twin without her counterpart, a lone being who is, by the miracle of her birth, not supposed to be alone. Much of Personal Shopper is about aloneness, the lack of presence. There’s a line at the very end of the film that asks a fascinating, eternal question, wondering if the dead are alone in whatever next place they’re in, or if it’s us the living who have been left behind. Assayas’s film answers zero questions—it poses a million—but its deepest dips into the unknowable fathoms of existence could never yield answers anyway. Stewart plays this curious liminal energy—Maureen can channel into the spiritual plane, but is very much a citizen of the hard and practical real world—with a delicacy and a deep commitment. Her performance suggests she and Assayas are connected on some peculiar, powerful wavelength. She just gets him, somehow.

And Peter Bradshaw’s review – don’t read because it’s a bit too spoilery for my taste – praises Stewart and the film:

Kristen Stewart’s performance is tremendous: she is calm and blank in the self-assured way of someone very competent, smart and young, yet her displays of emotion are very real and touching. She is entirely devoted to her smartphone, which is to be the conduit of her fears and there is a dash of pure Hitchcockian brilliance in a scene where she turns it on and a backlog of texts starts mounting up, bringing danger ever closer. With his reckless, audacious Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas has brought excitement to the festival.

While it’s likely a long shot where the Oscar race is concerned, it’s worth pointing out that Stewart seems to be playing the long game. She hit superstardom with Twilight, and then was almost eaten alive by the gossip press but has been slowly and surely building a unique collection of subtle, interesting performances.