6A — Monday, April 10, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Directed by Olivier Assayas 

(“Clouds of Sils Maria”), “Personal 
Shopper” is the story of Maureen 
(Kristen 
Stewart, 
“Certain 

Women”), an American expat 
living in Paris and working for 
a wealthy model as a personal 
shopper and assistant. Maureen 
is grappling with the recent death 
of her twin brother, Lewis, of 
a genetic heart condition. The 
siblings believed that they both had 
connections to the spirit world, so 
after his death, Maureen believes 
Lewis is attempting to contact her 
from beyond the grave. She also 
begins receiving messages from an 
unknown number, someone who 
knows intimate details of her life, 
and is strangely transfixed by them.

The film is difficult to categorize. 

It’s at once a tense psychological 
thriller, an understated exploration 
of grief and loneliness and a horror 
movie. Really, the film is a study 
in tonal shifts, some of which 
are more effective than others. 
Assayas attempts to balance these 
shifts by grounding the story in a 
kind of bland, muted affectation 
that encompasses the entire film. 
Characters speak at a low mumble, 
the visuals are bleak and graded 
grey, the edits are slow and blunt. 

The result is a deceptively simple 
surface that hides just how much is 
happening tonally and within the 
internal lives of the characters.

“Personal Shopper” takes a 

rather unconventional and tricky 
approach to storytelling. At a quick 
glance, it may appear meandering 
and plotless, but in reality, all of the 
drama happens within Stewart’s 
Maureen. It’s tightly focused on 
tracking her emotional progression 
as she tries to grapple with all of 
these feelings, which Stewart, 
who thrives in muted tones 
and 
understated 

characters, conveys 
in 
a 
brilliant 

performance. 
Maureen is a truly 
perfect 
character 

for Stewart — the kind of person 
whose stony and careful exterior is 
just a fragile cover for the deep well 
of feelings underneath.

Despite 
Stewart’s 
strength 

as 
an 
actress 
and 
Assayas’s 

clear understanding of plot and 
character mechanics, “Personal 
Shopper” is, well, a bit of a slog 
to get through. For one thing, it’s 
self-indulgent: For example, about 
halfway through the film, we’re 
treated to a nearly ten-minute 
sequence of Maureen anxiously 
answering and receiving texts 
from the unknown number on a 
train, mostly shot in tight shots of 

the phone itself. It’s so long and 
slow that you can’t help thinking 
there had to have been a better way 
to convey this information.

Even though its drama is well-

articulated through a carefully 
considered character arc, the movie 
still feels slow and meandering. It 
seems more concerned with being 
artful than with being empathetic. 
That is, there are some moments 
of genuine tension in the movie, 
but those moments are few and 
far between. We’re left with 
watching a character experience 

a lot of emotions, 
but nothing in the 
story apart from the 
character 
herself 

exists to enhance 
those 
feelings. 
I 

don’t suppose that it’s a particularly 
bad thing for a story to rely on an 
actor’s performance, but “Personal 
Shopper” would be absolutely 
nothing 
if 
not 
for 
Stewart’s 

charisma. There are no external 
conflicts, no ways for the audience 
to feel what Maureen is feeling — 
only ways for us to see it. To make 
a story resonate, storytellers need 
to work a lot harder than simply 
telling us what happened. As it 
stands, “Personal Shopper” gives 
its audience no reason to care. It’s 
a shame, too — it could have been 
beautiful. 

ASIF BECHER
Daily Arts Writer

LES FILMS DU LOSANGE

Still from new film, “Personal Shopper”
‘Shopper’ is technically 
perfect, underwhelming

Beautiful film “Personal Shopper” proves empty in meaning

“Personal Shopper”

Les Films du Losange

Michigan Theater

‘Pure’ a big undertaking 
that brings mixed results

Father John Misty returns with poetic brilliance and pretension

Two years ago, Father John 

Misty (originally known as Josh 
Tillman) proved his worth with I 
Love You, Honeybear. The album 
was a fully formed and emotional 
follow-up to Fear Fun, his first 
enterprise as “Father John Misty” 
since parting ways with the Fleet 
Foxes. Misty’s newest release, 
Pure Comedy, is less musically 
interesting than most of what he 
has done up until this point, but 
it has enough lyrical substance 
to keep his fan base happily 
questioning 
the 
meaning 
of 

life and mulling over the many 
shortcomings of humanity for as 
long as they please.

Pure Comedy starts off on a 

strong note. “Total Entertainment 
Forever” stands out in particular, 
calling into question the creepily 
dominant role that technology 
has come to play in our lives. The 
song approaches the subject from 
an eerie angle, and closes off with 
a strong stanza predicting how 
someday historians will find us “In 
our homes / Plugged into our hubs 
/ Skin and bones / A frozen smile 
on every face.” The closing line, 
“This must have been a wonderful 
place,” hammers in the sinking 
feeling that the rest of the song has 
been building up: the sense that 
our elaborate technologies are only 
keeping us busy and distracted, 
while history trickles away all 
around us.

Pure Comedy sees its strongest 

moments when it is exploring 
messages like this, and to be 
fair, the album does a lot of 
exploring. 
Questions 
of 
the 

validity of millennial life and 
the pervasiveness of corruption 
ebb and flow through songs like 
“Things It Would Have Been 
Helpful to Know Before the 
Revolution,” “Birdie” and “Two 

Wildly Different Perspectives,” 
and 
manifest 
in 
their 
most 

memorable form in “Leaving 
LA,” a thirteen-minute-long self-
described “diatribe” that sums up a 
lot of the main points of the album. 
It’s melodically repetitive and 
doesn’t quite need to be thirteen 
minutes long, but it does include 
some striking and well-crafted 
scenes, like a van cruising past 
commercial billboards on its way 
out of L.A., and a child (presumably 
the young Misty) choking on a 
piece of watermelon candy in a 
JCPenney.

For all of Misty’s 

lyrical 
passion, 

he 
sometimes 

overshoots 
his 

target. Not all of his 
insights are exactly 
revelations; 
in 

“When the God of Love Returns,” 
for instance, he remarks on how 
the true hell is human nature, 
and how “this place is savage and 
unjust,” both of which are fair 
messages, although not really 
new ones. In addition, “Ballad 
of a Dying Man” notes how we 
leave this world “as clueless as we 
came,” at the end of a song that 
aligns Misty’s perspective with 
that of a dying man, even though 
he likely has never been one. Misty 
is an intelligent songwriter, but 
he can get carried away with his 
own language, just enough that it 
fails slightly to match up with a lot 
of the substance that would have 
been behind it.

The album also doesn’t take on 

very much in the way of melodic 
experimentation. Misty proved in 
I Love You, Honeybear that he was 
able to explore musically within 
an album, and there are ways in 
which he tries to take this in a new 
direction on Pure Comedy. “Birdie” 
makes for a cool, synthetic blend 
of styles, featuring electronics, 
piano and echoey vocals, and “The 
Memo” features an interesting 

change 
in 
tone 
toward 
the 

end of the song, as well as the 
incorporation of automated voices. 
The penultimate track, “So I’m 
Growing Old on Magic Mountain,” 
also finds a gentle, artful tone 
with which to start closing off the 
album. However, since the album 
starts out with some variety and 
then regains its depth toward the 
end, it would have been nice to see 
more inventiveness throughout its 
duration. This is true in particular 
because Misty so clearly fashions 
the journey of the album as a 

sort of Odyssean 
exploration 
of 

the 
experience 

of humanity, and 
since humanity can 
look like so many 
different things, the 
music of the album 

could have reflected some more 
variety.

Misty clearly understood the 

gravity of his undertaking, since 
the album is nearly an hour and 
fifteen minutes long. He genuinely 
wanted to make sure that he 
was successfully saying what he 
wanted to say with Pure Comedy, 
and really, this is when it all comes 
down to the listener. Misty indulges 
himself in going a little overboard 
with his own language, and an 
album that tries so hard to impress 
lyrically could have benefited 
from a little more attention to the 
innovative potential of the music 
itself. However, he clearly cares 
about the messages he is trying to 
get across in terms of consumer 
culture and general reliance upon 
entertainment, and this sentiment 
does come through in his lyrics. In 
spite of the album’s shortcomings, 
anyone who is already a fan of 
Misty’s poetic habits and the less 
romantic, more philosophical side 
of his songwriting will find at least 
a few key messages to appreciate in 
Pure Comedy.

LAURA DZUBAY

Daily Arts Writer

Pure Comedy

Father John Misty

Sub Pop

ALBUM REVIEW

Where women play a role 
in the gender-bent theatre

Writer Eli Rallo explores the blurring lines of gender and theatre

The future of the world is 

female. The future of art is female. 
The future of theatre is female.

When I was a naive eight-

year-old interested in theatre and 
music, my parents enrolled me in 
a theatre program at a local dance 
studio. We were doing “Hairspray 
Jr.” and did not have enough boys 
in the cast. Because of this, I was 
cast as the charismatic, titular 
male host of the “Corny Collins 
Show,” Corny Collins. In the 

world of theatre, this is called 
“genderbending.” 
Genderbent 

casting occurs in one of two ways: 
Either the role is changed to suit 
the gender of the actor or the actor 
plays the opposite gender.

In my case, at eight years old, I 

was playing the opposite gender 
— slicked back hair, a tiny suit, 
Converse high tops, and I looked 
like, well, a little boy. At this age, 
I didn’t have the mental capacity 
to 
really 
think 
about 
what 

genderbent casting meant and 
how conversations about gender 
have really made a home in the 
theatre. However, as I’ve grown 

up, thinking about that moment in 
my life — in which I took on a male 
role without a single comment 
or complaint — has led me to 
discover an interest with gender 
and casting in the theatre.

Genderbent 
theatre 
casting 

began in the time of Shakespeare, 
when women were not a part of 
theatre, which led to men dressing 
in women’s clothes and playing 
the female roles. It is so intriguing 
to me that one of the most 
liberating forms of expression was 
once confined to the patriarchy in 
a completely nonsensical way.

As as kid, I was playing a 

male role because the director 
had no choice. But now, as an 
eighteen-year-old in a constantly 
progressing world, the choice to 
have a woman occupy a historically 
male role defies an array of norms. 
It provides for thought-provoking 
conversation; it is not just a choice 
made out of necessity, but for a 
myriad of other reasons.

Today, it is becoming more 

common to see women playing 
male roles as social criticism or 
artistic choice by the director of 
the piece. To me, it is stunning 
and important to see a female 
“Hamlet” 
(Diane 
Venora 
in 

Joseph Papp’s adaptation), a role 
originally created to be played 
by a male. Seeing a female as this 
strong leading character changes 
the message of the show and 
provides a new context to its well-

known plot. 

There has been controversy 

surrounding genderbent casting 
for years. The best example of this 
can be found through the original 
1954 Broadway production of the 
musical “Peter Pan.”

Ever since Mary Martin took 

the stage as the iconic lead role, 
women have been cast as Peter. 
This raises the debate whether 
the cross-gender casting of Peter 
Pan reflects the movement toward 
equality of women in society or 
if it reflects the old concept that 
suggests a boy who is effeminate 
and can’t grow up has to be played 
by a female.

Due to these controversies, 

greater than just the necessity 
for more gender bent casting 
in professional theatre is the 
necessity for more strong, resilient 

female lead roles. If the world sees 
an array of female characters in 
theatre holding important jobs, 
carrying big decisions and being 
the catalyst for action instead of 
timid stock characters or damsels 
in distress, there may be no need 
to bend male roles to make social 
statements.

Until the theatre community 

recognizes the power of a female 
driven plot or a female lead, 
directors must continue to look 
at casting in a way that seeks 
to inspire the female, not leave 
her to the same types of roles 
she is “expected” to play. This 
genderbent style of casting seeks 
to show the audience that women 
can do anything men can do.

ELI RALLO

Daily Arts Writer

FILM REVIEW

COMMUNITY CULTURE NOTEBOOK

Read more at MichiganDaily.

