I want to ask Christine's personal buyer what he means.

This is a film review published in Weibo's Deep Focus movie, which I think is well interpreted. Private Buyer is a very avant-garde and profound movie, and K powder who can't understand it can read this film review carefully.

If "Meat and Spirit" is an interesting film just after watching it, the more I think about it, the less memorable it is, then "Private Buyer" is just the opposite, which is the same. I can probably understand why it was booed when it was first shown in Cannes. Everyone may look forward to it with the mentality of watching a supernatural film. In the end, there is no "ghost", but this ghost doesn't seem to be so important. The whole film is constantly haunted by ghosts, but this atmosphere seems to be not brought by ghosts. After all, people need a process to accept things that don't meet expectations.

This is not a film about whether there is a ghost or not and who the ghost really is. In fact, it is a very innovative film about women's consciousness. Innovation does not lie in the content of female consciousness itself, but provides a new way to awaken female consciousness in a modern environment.

If you want to explore what the director wants to express, you must explain the word ghost. Interestingly, the word "Ghost", which is most often used to refer to ghosts, rarely appears in movies, but basically uses words like "super nature" or "spiritual". The director doesn't seem to want to rely on the supernatural phenomena in the film, and from beginning to end, the director doesn't explicitly name who the ghost is. The ghost here actually has a very subtle metaphor.

We are in a ghostly information technology era, in an era when the real and virtual boundaries are almost blurred and can be detected, just like ghosts, between the entity and the intangible. Such vague temperament permeates every corner of the film. We are all ghosts in other people's eyes.

Maureen, played by Kristen Stewart, can hardly meet her boss. They contact each other by phone and text message. She can't even meet her boyfriend. They use skype video. Even if you meet your friends and customers, it will be as short as a dragonfly. She shuttled between different cities, watched videos on her mobile phone in the restaurant, and painted in her house, floating like a ghost.

Many sci-fi video works (Black Mirror, blade runner and The Matrix) create loneliness by creating physical barriers in space, which is of course the usual method. However, the great thing about Assaia is that he doesn't look back, but shows this kind of loneliness in a movie year that almost coincides with the real age. He even looked forward, looking for such loneliness in his previous images. Why this technique is very clever. Take surrealism as an example. If we have a preset "it's false" when watching a photo, the aura it brings is always confined to pure fiction, or it is far away from real life. But what is really powerful about surrealism photography (and the reason why it is different from collage works) is that it deviates from the "false" preset and presents a strange feeling rooted in real life.

This is also the fascinating place of Personal Buyer, which presents surreal loneliness in daily trivial life. Loneliness does not only appear when you are isolated from the world, but also when Maureen is facing the cold screen and communicating with different people. Accustomed to this model, she has a great sense of communication when she really communicates face to face with people, just like a medieval ghost floating in an old castle. Looking at people living, she can get close and can't communicate because she is different. Others are hell, and we are all ghosts in others' eyes.

In the movie, Maureen keeps mentioning one word: Medium. The literal translation of this word is called media. In movies, most people think it refers to people who can be psychic. Maureen and her brother Louis are both capable people. However, Maureen went to watch the documentary of the abstract artist Hilma af Klint, in which the artist said that people above our dimension gave her a sign to create such paintings. In fact, there has always been a view that all artistic creations are created by God holding their hands. Artists accept some kind of energy from the universe and transmit it to white paper and canvas.

The artist is a container, a channel and a medium. In the era of diversified media, the media has a variety of names. Computers, mobile phones, and even Maureen, a private buyer who shuttles around to choose clothes for his boss, are all media to some extent. Through the media, the ghost defined in the film is no longer a purely objective thing different from the human body, but a kind of material energy mixed with the subconscious. As a medium, the human body is constantly influenced by external energy and its own subconscious. As Assaia mentioned after the film, he attaches great importance to the influence and function of subconsciousness on people.

In the film, Maureen always said that she was waiting for her brother who died suddenly to give him a message, and everyone around her was ready to get out of the pain. She was still waiting, constantly waiting in the house, living in an unfamiliar city and doing a job she didn't like. This strong obsession was not only a traumatic stress reaction brought about by the death of her loved one, but actually a certain lack of self-awareness of Maureen.

In the routine check-up in the hospital, the doctor mentioned that Maureen's dead brother Louis was her twin blood relative, and they even had the same congenital heart disease. The purpose of this play is to show that Louis is not only a brother to Maureen, but also a mirror image of himself.

Obsession is often based on a sense of security for no reason. Maureen's sense of security is all in her brother. Subconsciously, they are one, and her brother's departure takes away a part of herself. She is waiting, waiting for not only the message from her brother, but her self, which she didn't realize at the beginning of the film.

Why do you say that Assaia is really good at shooting women's films? In this era, if women's consciousness films still follow the traditional routine of family oppression, forced marriage, meeting true love, running away and dying, will it be a bit outdated? "Private Buyer" is about a process of awakening women's self-awareness in today's era. She is not so straightforward and obvious, but subtly happens in this ghostly society. The key link in this process is anonymous SMS, which is also the most suspenseful plot in the whole film.

at first, Maureen received a short message and talked to him with the idea of suspecting that it was Louis. In fact, one after another, Maureen already knew that it was not Louis, but she continued to talk to him because this short message gradually aroused her female self-awareness. Perhaps the anonymous SMS sender didn't expect it, because he teased with ulterior motives, and he didn't respond to everything except waiting for his brother's message. Maureen began to shift her focus to herself, and she began to face up to her shame, her desire, the most direct embodiment. She changed into Tom Boy's costume, put on her star boss's sexy underwear and skirt, and masturbated in the boss's bed. Only in this paragraph of the whole film, Louis, the brother who accompanied him like a shadow, disappeared from Maureen's mind. Maureen began to realize the existence of her own body, her own desire, and that she was an individual independent of her brother.

In the movie, Maureen's awakening process is presented as a process of waiting for news of her brother's death. Maureen keeps encountering all kinds of signs, including text messages, but none of them can make her sure whether it is from her brother. Every disappointment brings self-doubt, and constant self-doubt brings the collapse of her nonexistent sense of security pinned on her brother. At the end of the film, the boyfriend who only appeared in skype disappeared, and Maureen said to another extremely strong sign alone, "Maybe, it's really just myself (Or it is just me? At that moment, she finally realized the existence of self. She feels afraid and strongly uneasy, which is not a bad thing. Losing her sense of security is the beginning of knowing herself.

From the beginning to the end, the director controls the extremely unified temperament of the whole film, and this "ghost sense" runs through all aspects of the plot, characters, social environment and audio-visual language. He has no intention of discussing whether there is a soul or whether it is Louis. Self-awareness is never black or white, and various factors around us will directly or indirectly affect it. Feminist films can no longer only be violent resistance and sacrifice, but can be like ghosts, with ambiguity between tangible and intangible.

What needs to be pointed out in particular is that perhaps her temperament is too consistent with the characters in the film. Kristen Stewart, who has been criticized for "facial paralysis", exudes unparalleled temperament in the film, and Assaia also digs out a very infectious moment from her. I will always remember her riding a motorcycle alone, shuttling through the streets of Paris, not knowing where to go.

In the second half of the film, in Crown Hotel, the elevator door automatically opens and closes, and the induction door in the hotel lobby automatically opens and closes. Something seems to have left, and I choose to believe that it was Louis who left.