IFC Films is seemingly determined to diminish the potential box-office of Olivier Assayas‘s Personal Shopper (3.10). First they decide to open it ten months after a bravura debut at last May’s Cannes Film Festival, and over five months after it played at last September’s Toronto and New York film festivals, thus ensuring that the buzz will be dissipated if not forgotten by opening day. Now they’ve come up with a poster that doesn’t even vaguely suggest in visual terms that Personal Shopper is a ghost story. (Yes, there’s a critic blurb that uses the term but good posters always deliver the message in visceral terms.) A fan poster that I found on a Kristen Stewart site does a far better job of conveying the mood and feel of it.
(l.) IFC Films’ recently posted one-sheet for Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper, which will open on 3.10; (r.) a far superior fan poster — one that suggets weird spookery on some level, but at the same doesn’t promise a conventional horror flick.