Shopgirl

This movie I watched through a cable channel some months back and it still begs for me to write something about it. Did I shed some bucket of tears? Yes, I did. It is a bittersweet look at modern relationships. A relationship that is both in existence and a fiction. It is a movie which will make you ask yourself if you want to hurt now or hurt later.

The movie follows the interconnected lives of three people searching for connection; but it is neither a conventional comedy nor a typical fairy-tale romance. Instead, it is a disarmingly tender exploration of love in the real world, of the confusion and miscommunication between men and women that throw a wrench in the works of so many contemporary love affairs. It is a story that raises provocative, conversation-sparking questions about the different things we want from love --- and about how sometimes we settle for what we need.

The story revolves around the lives of three people. Mirabelle (played by Claire Danes) works at a Saks Fifth Avenue glove department by day and at night she works at honing her unfulfilled artist dreams. While being employed, she finds herself one day struggling to get out from under a growing mountain of debt from student loans and credit cards. All she ever wanted is to be loved like any normal woman would. Then she met Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) one night while she was doing her laundry, young man with little ambition and zero means, she begins an awkward relationship with him. Then along comes Steve Martin’s Ray Porter --- the older, wealthier, far more worldly charmer who sweeps Mirabelle completely off her feet. Ray shows Mirabelle the affection for which she has so long yearned…then turns her life completely upside down as she realizes that they have completely misunderstood one another. What she saw as a fairy-tale dream, he saw as a temporary pleasure --- and both of them, it seems, were wrong.

“As Ray Porter watches Mirabelle walk away, he feels a loss. How is it possible, he wonders, to miss a woman who he kept at a distance, so that when she was gone, he would not miss her? Only then does he realize how in wanting part of her but not all of her, he had hurt them both, and he cannot justify his actions except that, well, it was life.”

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