On the films of Olivier Assayas and what makes his work different from other contemporary French cinema.

Assayas began his career as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinéma, which means his films are made by someone who has thought rigorously about what cinema is for and has formed specific positions about it.

His early films — Cold Water, Irma Vep — are explicitly in dialogue with the French New Wave tradition: they share its interest in performance and its discomfort with polish. The later films — Summer Hours, Clouds of Sils Maria, Personal Shopper — are more formally controlled but retain a quality of uncertainty about genre and mode.

What distinguishes Assayas from directors who are merely influenced by the New Wave is his interest in the present tense. His films are set in the specific contemporary moment of their making, with specific contemporary anxieties — globalization, digital life, the decline of cultural institutions. This contemporariness is unusual in art house cinema, which tends toward either historical settings or a studied timelessness.

Personal Shopper is his most formally unusual film: a ghost story that is also a grief film that is also a film about the particular alienation of working in the fashion industry. The three registers don't resolve. The film ends in the condition of unresolvedness and offers it as the only honest answer.