The year was 1920…
… and it was a dark and stormy night. The lightning flashed and the rain lashed the mysterious old house where Nikola Tesla was putting the finishing touches to his greatest invention, the tele-time-ceiver. Surpassing even his triumphant detection of extra-terrestrial radio signals, his new device would allow him to pierce the very veil of time itself! The final screw was connected, the final wire tightened; the mad genius flipped the final contact and the machine hummed into life. Slowly, as vast energies accumulated within the apparatus, it began to pick up signals never yet broadcast; the rumbles of war in 1939; of revolution in 1968. As it approached the limits of its powers, the signals began to be overcome by interference. Tesla halted the machine at the year 2005, and gazed at the flickering, disjointed images of another age. As he stared, rapt in wonder, an idea formed in his head; he grabbed pen and paper and began to write: not scientific invention this time, but _a movie script_.
That, at least, is how I like to imagine the script of Shopgirl coming about. It’s an odd film; clearly set in the present day, but just as clearly animated by an archaic sensibility. Sometimes, this just leads to surface incoherence. Steve Martin is humorously unaware of what ‘jerk chicken’ is, presumably demonstrating that he is an old man, out of touch with the wild food habits of the modern age. But a few scenes later, we see Martin deftly wielding chopsticks, as suave, cosmopolitan dot-com millionaire. More seriously, it makes it difficult to figure out the narrative: are we supposed to take seriously the broad strokes that delineate Claire Danes’s character (Mirabelle) as A Lonely Young Woman (she sleeps alone in a double bed; she has a cat)? Shouldn’t we be more troubled than the film appears to be by the power relations in her relationship with rich old Steve Martin? I’m not saying the film has to forthrightly condemn old men shagging young women; but the _assumption_ that seems to be implicit, that his is an appropriate mode of courtship, seems like it should have been untenable for about 50 years.
There’s also the strangely unsure tone of the film. There’s a lot of broad comedy around Claire Danes’s other suitor (and I mean BBC sitcom broad, that is to say, unfunny); are similarly uncomfortable moments in her relationship with Martin also supposed to be funny? It seems not. How, then, to understand the resolution of the film, in which Jeremy’s transformation by yoga self-help tapes makes him a suitable partner for Mirabelle in contrast to Ray (Martin’s character)? Though “resolution” is a slightly odd word to use of the end of a film which entirely lacks narrative momentum. That lack is not necessarily a problem — In The Mood For Love is the same, and I love it in part _for_ that — but there seems no obvious reason other than the plot for this film to exist at all.
Still, anthrochica liked it, so maybe I’m missing something. And Claire Danes is both an excellent actor and consistently wears lovely clothes throughout, so the film’s not a total waste of time.
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I haven’t seen the film, but given that old-young shagging would figure centrally, I was reminded of Lost in Translation. Is this sort of relationship coming back into style? It certainly seems less taboo than would have been the case before…
Comment by geo @ 11/7/2005 9:30 am
It would only be taboo if she was the older woman and he was a younger man. Otherwise its just another classic male fantasy (”I may be old and as ugly as Steve Martin, but pretty young women will still want to shag me!!”) When did that kind of optermism ever go out of style?
Comment by moll @ 11/7/2005 8:10 pm