Shopgirl

Synopsis: The story follows Mirabelle (Claire Danes), a disenchanted salesgirl and aspiring artist who sells gloves and accessories at a department store. She has two men in her life: wealthy divorcee Ray Porter (Steve Martin) and struggling musician Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman). When Mirabelle falls for the glamorous Ray her life takes a magical turn, but eventually she realises that she must make a choice between them.

Steve Martin is a deeply cynical man. That is the conclusion I have reached after watching a film that is as emotionally distant as the man Martin plays in the film. He is also a gifted writer (he adapted his own novel for the screen) with an uncanny knack for describing the fractures that people suffer from but though there is quite a lot of think about here there is little warmth in his gaze,

As I described the basic premise of this film to a friend, she laughed at me and said I was going to see a chick flick. And on paper, it does sound like one. Girl meets boy, boy is a bit selfish and man comes along, woos girl, girl swoons for attention before finally coming back to boy because he loves her while the man just wants her. Typical love story with good guy, bad guy and girl in between. But this is a chick flick from hell. Nobody escapes Martin's clinical eye, and the resulting portrait of humanity is so mechanistically depressing that you could be forgiven for thinking that love is nothing more than a series of rules to be learned, matched with unspoken yet desperate mutual need for validation.

Mirabelle is a lonely woman, and after hearing on the radio that it's important to be held, she sleeps with Jeremy in the hopes of discovering the satisfaction promised her by that disembodied voice of wisdom. But he's clueless, and treats her casually. Though he does obviously like her, he can't quite get it together enough to do anything about it. Then a mysterious but emotionally distant millionaire lavishes her with attention. The resulting situation is really about the lies people tell themselves and each other when they're too afraid to be alone, and the hurt that this kind of relationship can cause. At times it's quite disturbing to watch, truth be told.

The film isn't all negative though, it's actually a smartly-directed black comedy. Jeremy discovers how to demonstrate love by listening to self-help tapes. Ray simply won't be demonstrative, even though he knows how. Everyone in this film is crippled in some way. But they all have a chance for us to feel for them, laugh at them or with them, engage us in some way. But even so, we never really get to know them. They're always held at a remove, we observe them in their environment, but we don't so much interact with them as watch what they'll do next.

Shopgirl is a beautifully-shot film with a lot to say about how people can mistreat each other and themselves out of fear or selfishness, but I can't help but feel that, like the people it describes, something is missing. Or could that be the point?

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