TIFF ’05: Shopgirl

**/****
starring Steve Martin, Claire Danes, Jason Schwartzman, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras
screenplay by Steve Martin, based on his novella
directed by Anand Tucker

by Bill Chambers Believe it or not, it takes more out of you to watch Anand Tucker's Shopgirl than to read the Steve Martin novella on which it's based. As in his Hilary and Jackie, Tucker seems to be striving for something lyrical but winds up with something purple, submerging as he does nearly every scene in Barrington Pheloung's syrupy score whilst failing to consolidate redundant emotional gestures. Consequently, Shopgirl is like Lost in Translation on steroids, bloated where the other is wispy, with Martin's middle-aged lothario Ray Porter temporarily filling the void in the life of Mirabelle Buttersfield (Claire Danes), a culturally-displaced ethereal beauty several years his junior. All three leads–Jason Schwartzman plays a young bohemian, Jeremy, whose courtship of Mirabelle grinds to a halt once Ray enters the picture–do fine, idiosyncratic work (Danes hasn't been this good since her "My So-Called Life" heyday, though I could've done without the distracting, meta-feeling glimpse of that show's DVD box set), but where the stark prose of Martin's book made the most of Mirabelle's depressive state ("[Jeremy] never complicates a desire by overthinking it, unlike Mirabelle, who spins a cocoon around an idea until it is immobile," Martin writes) and rendered palatable the characters' improbable relationships, an objective interpretation of the story, particularly one as overcooked as this, throws its essential hollowness into sharp relief. Still, Tucker has a fixation with Danes's feet that at least indicates a directorial presence, something Martin vehicles have lacked for too long. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations