True Romance

"See something you like?": Ray (Steve Martin) and Mirabelle (Claire Danes) get to know each other in Shopgirl. Courtesy Hyde Park Entertainment.

When the major film studios resolve to tell a love story, the result is usually brash, gaudy, histrionic — in other words, utterly outside the realm of actual human experience. Which is why few mainstream directors have the patience for a concept like Shopgirl; as love stories go, it’s doggedly understated. The characters are physically appealing, but in a refreshingly natural way; they don’t have the chiselled proportions and varnished skin of underwear models. The sex is tender rather than intense; the declarations of love are whispered rather than hollered.

Shopgirl is a classy romance set in that most déclassé of cities: Los Angeles. The tale centres on Mirabelle (Claire Danes), a conscientious young woman who mans the glove counter at Saks Fifth Avenue. By day, she chafes at the pretensions of the nouveau riche and tries desperately to keep boredom at bay, all so she can repay her massive student loan; by night, she lolls in her quaint walk-up apartment, making drawings and idealizing the perfect man. One night at the laundromat, Mirabelle meets Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), a scruffy young dude who stops burbling on about his arcane livelihood

Beautiful dreamers: Mirabelle and Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman) on their first date. Courtesy Hyde Park Entertainment.

(he designs fonts for guitar amplifiers) long enough to ask for her phone number. Jeremy is the sort of guy who puts little stock in good grooming and financial liquidity, convinced that forthrightness is all the currency you need to win a girl’s affections. Starved for companionship, Mirabelle gives him her number. While their first few dates are, by most standards, calamitous, Mirabelle maintains enough of an interest in this shaggy imp not to dismiss him entirely.

One day at Saks, a debonair older gentleman purchases a pair of black gloves from Mirabelle. That night, she finds this very same pair in a gift box on her doorstep; attached is a note from a “Ray Porter,” inviting her to dinner at a swishy resto. Intrigued, she meets him. Mirabelle learns that Ray (Steve Martin) is a “logician,” a rather elusive vocation that seems to pay exceedingly well. (A frequent business traveler, Ray has large homes in both L.A. and Seattle). They continue to see each other. Finding herself drawn to this improbable admirer, Mirabelle tells a thwarted Jeremy that she’s seeing someone else.

Admittedly, many moviegoers will be unsettled by the suggestion of the 60-year-old Martin wooing Danes, who is all of 26. (Others will simply be puzzled that he’s not playing another sarcastic jackass.) That’s because we’ve been conditioned by romantic comedies to see older men as unconscionably lecherous for wanting to pursue younger women.

One of the pleasures of Shopgirl is the way it quashes this cliché. Martin deserves full credit for this. For one, he authored the charming, sympathetic novella on which the screenplay is based; secondly, he brings the requisite sensitivity to the role. Like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation — another aging comic cast as a quasi-father figure to an emotionally marooned young woman — Martin is very mellow. (So mellow, in fact, that his performance borders on lacklustre — which isn’t necessarily a criticism.)

Love hurts: Mirabelle is stunned by Ray's admission. Courtesy Hyde Park Entertainment.

Unlike the May-December romance in Lost in Translation, this one is actually consummated; thankfully, it never feels prurient or exploitive. Despite her self-doubt and reliance on anti-depressants, Mirabelle never seems like the formulaic damsel; Danes finds a precise balance between strength and vulnerability. Martin, on the other hand, eschews all the heroic trappings of the older lover.

It’s easy to see why Mirabelle might fall for Ray: he’s compassionate, mature and legitimately interested in her thoughts and feelings — quite unlike Jeremy, who, despite being wittier than most of his ilk, sees her less as a person than a prize. Plus, Ray actually makes the effort to woo her. (It helps that Ray is quite wealthy — though even he acknowledges that he can’t spend his way into her heart.)

Of course, amour is never easy. Two things come to complicate Mirabelle’s infatuation: Ray’s admission of a fling; and the return of Jeremy, who has spent several months as a roadie for a touring rock band, which gave him the opportunity to bone up on self-help tapes.

It’s obvious that Martin and director Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie) are more than a little enamoured of Lost in Translation; with its muted dialogue, ethereal indie soundtrack and languorous shots of the L.A. skyline, Shopgirl feels like the American complement to Sofia Coppola’s film. Both feel less like movies than hypnotic reveries. If Shopgirl errs, it’s in forcing the fairy-tale motif: there are a few too many shots of star-filled skies, a few too many string cues and entirely too many intrusions from Martin as the avuncular voiceover narrator (a rather jarring add-on, considering Martin’s primary role in the film). But for a picture with this much heart, these feel like petty quibbles.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

Letters:

It is incredibly interesting to me that a movie about a "love story" between a sixty-year-old man (one who is seven years my father's senior) and a young woman (who is two years my junior) is noted as being a "rarity in Hollywood - a plausible love story". In fact, in an industry where leading Hollywood men are for the most part paired with women who are far younger than they (think Catherine Zeta-Jones and Sean Connery or Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson to name but two of a myriad of films), the film is itself not an anomaly, but the norm. A rare, plausible "love story" in Hollywood, would more likely be one where a sixty-year-old man is paired with a woman relatively close to his own age. A real rarity would also be if the film reviewer addressed the fact that the "real-life" companions, lovers, friends of sixty-year-old men (namely sixty-year-old women) are utterly ignored by Hollywood because women past a certain age are not deemed "desirable" enough to be the lovers of men the same age as them. Perhaps he could have addressed the "rarity" of older women as the romantic lead in movies with younger men in this review. Sadly, instead, the author has done nothing but maintain the status quo, as incredibly "unrare" authors do.


Stephanie Lanthier
Kingston, Ontario