Maureen is 27 years old, American and lives in Paris, where she is a personal shopper.

Her twin brother Lewis died from a congenital heart malformation from which she also suffers.

She wants to get in touch with him and attends a 'home to meet him and get some signals.

In the meantime he does his job as a fashion consultant with a speedy pizza boy look, riding a moped; he goes to the best luxury brand stores; he has stratospheric budgets for his employer, one Kyra, who is never seen except in photos or on social media. His pay does not match the budget at all and he receives no particular personal or financial rewards for his business.

Between Laboutin, Chanel and Cartier, spiritualism, séances and presences, she travels to London to shop, meets occasionally on skype with a pseudo partner while always seeking signals from her brother.

An anonymous/stalker contacts her via whatsapp and offers her a great chance: to re-eroticize a de-eroticized body, touching on the dimension of fear for the forbidden but also a murder plunges into her professional life and this still confuses her, Maureen is destined to come to terms with death.

This is the story of the film but the film is a whole other story....

Easy to guess from the beginning.

Who Maureen actually is and what she is looking for.

What presences are being talked about, and what dimension she wanders into.

Assayas amuses himself by teasing the audience; like the Nietzschean madman in Gaia Scienza announcing the death of God: what does he want to tell the unbelieving and naive viewer, what does he want to anticipate to the ebete on duty hypnotized by ghosts, fears and his own shadows?

Laughing Assayas fills the audience with nonsense and metaphysical beliefs, made up of afterlife, afterlife, the living dead and the living dead.

Everyone is at the mercy of a confusing life: the rich of superfluity and vanity and the poor of survival and alienation.

The rich are so miserable that they have no time to have time and the poor are so poor that they have no time to be.

Ghosts, siblings, social networks, murder, existential whirlwinds for bystanders who will see what they can.

An empty, fake fast life mocks an audience so steeped in fiction that they do not understand where life begins and life ends.

A subject bamboozled in a bubble of suggestions that he himself becomes the protagonist of a film that must (?) eventually reveal the code to him in order to understand what a trap he has walked into.

But will he figure it out?

Assayas as the Grand Inquisitor, he sets up an impeccable, sadistic, monstrously ingenious game in which there is no subject but only objects of his astonished and disenchanted, embarrassed and amused gaze; a sarcastic presence, his that looms over the film with satanic laughter.

A spell that enchants the enchanted; but those who see as he does, decry from the beginning.

Like an abstract painting meant to confuse the extremely figurative view of the concept, everything is trivially before the eyes of those with the correct light setting suitable for seeing.

But why reveal the arcane design at the end?

An ending that yields to cloying philanthropy, a gesture of tenderness and pity for a too-human human, an alienated, wretched, worn-out slave, broken by an outsized world.

But why this mercy? Why this gesture of compassion?

Those who have not understood will not

Those who have understood will not be surprised

Those who will understand only at the end will feel quite offended, one hopes, by an insult spat in the face by a work of art so ruthless and so true

A deportation to a camp of inauthentic presences, a last-second philanthropy that reveals perhaps the most dogged and desperate misanthropy.

But who knows only behind contempt lies true love, and this film is nonetheless a great gesture of love.

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice