Queer body,ghosts and solitude: following “Clouds of Sils Maria” (2014), “PersonalShopper” (2016) by Oliver Assayas focuses on a Kristen Stewart cinematographicincarnation that defies the traditional borders between reality and screen. Itis precisely the adhesion between Stewart and her “Personal Shopper” character,perfected after the prototype proposed in “Clouds of Sils Maria”, that raisesfemale queerness as a deceiving, mystical, reality-challenging bodilyperception. Stewart’s character, Maureen, dissolves and reshapes into theghosts around her, haunted by a forever-lost “wholeness”—grief—which she feelsshe can reach only by receiving a “sign” from her deceased brother. Splitbetween the luxury and despair of the fashion world and the intimate mourningof her loss, Maureen moves frantically, running between cities, from andtowards desire, to fill her Lacanian “lack” and give meaning to her queer,hidden, grieving, erotic force. She recognizes this as her essence—and yetfears it; whenever she faces a mirror, she gets lost in her shiftingreflection.

In "Personal Shopper" both OliverAssayas and Kristen Stewart orient towards a queer, feminist reconstruction ofLacan’s three stages for the birth of the self. To demonstrate the film'ssubversive outreach, we will adopt a framework mainly informed by thepost-Lacanian feminist theorists Irigaray, Kristeva, Grosz, Zupančič and theirdistinctive blend of semiotics and psychoanalysis, while accounting for some ofthe most prominent feminist film theories on queer, female characters andsubjectivities in films.