REVIEWED - SHOPGIRL ALL THE lonely people, where do they all come from? In movies it's most likely to be Los Angeles, the setting for such epics of social disconnection as Short Cuts, Magnolia and Crash, and the milieu for the more intimate Shopgirl, adapted for the screen by Steve Martin from his novella of the same name.
The eponymous protagonist, Mirabelle Buttersfield, is a young woman as socially awkward as her name. Even at work in a shopping mall she seems isolated, tucked away in a corner of an LA outlet of Saks Fifth Avenue, where she sells gloves.
Played by Claire Danes, Mirabelle is from Vermont, has aspirations as an artist and lives alone with her cat. Then, quite unexpectedly, two suitors come along at once.
Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) designs logos and fonts and describes himself as a stencil artist. He is around her own age, but even more gauche. Ray (Steve Martin) is a wealthy middle-aged man who goes through the motions of buying gloves before inviting her to dinner. Jeremy is spirited and carefree, whereas Ray is stiff and formal, and Mirabelle is open, inexperienced and vulnerable.
From that premise, Martin's screenplay offers acute, telling reflections on the hurtful nature of personal relationships. As Mirabelle gets more deeply involved with his predatory, casually exploitative character, the film takes on the form of an emotional thriller.
The director is Anand Tucker, the former BBC arts programme producer who made an overwrought feature film debut with Hilary and Jackie. He treats Martin's material with such levels of skill and sensitivity that Shopgirl exerts a compelling hold on the viewer, and it gains in dramatic power from a rich orchestral score by Barrington Pheloung, the composer on the Inspector Morse series.
Having crafted one of the darkest roles of his career for himself, Martin is at his most self-deprecating here. Ideally cast in a part that doesn't stretch him, Schwartzman is as engaging as he ought to be. The magnet for our eyes, however, is the sublimely low-key Danes, who is touchingly tender and sympathetic in this appealing serious comedy that leaves a bittersweet aftertaste.
Michael Dwyer
