Shopgirl

If she were your friend, you'd tell Mirabelle Buttersfield she needed to quit hoping that Ray Parker will come around. After a few too many beers, you'd slap her and scream, "Wake up, wake up, wake up!" Because whatever half-lived dream she's stuck in, it's excruciating to watch. The movie of her story is deliberate, affecting, and slight - dated and pre-feminist in ways that may be telling us that men and women are all taking leaps backward.

Mirabelle is a would-be artist and counter girl at Saks in L.A. SheÂ’s waiting for life to really begin, but a light of hopefulness shines from her. She hopes, in defiance of her experience, for love. And by drawing, she hopes to find something undefined. Claire DanesÂ’ Mirabelle is both bright and dialed back, transforming a passive character into one so winning that we hope she finds the elusive object of her desire.

She's vivid, sure, but Mirabelle lingers in the voyeuristic, fetishistic fascination of the writer (Steve Martin) and director (Anand Tucker). For her, or them, the last forty years in America have had little effect on relations between men and women (Think of the first act of The Apartment.) She accepts expensive gifts, loan repayments, trips to the East coast, and designer dresses without questioning Ray's motives or her own. Her patience and willingness to accept Ray at face value appears to be the charm that wins him. Ray - Steve Martin playing a character created by Steve Martin; 'nuf said - gets off way too easy.

What's working in this story? Because love is The Great Possibility, the Overriding Good, we want Mirabelle to have real love, the only thing seemingly within her reach. But we come to fear Ray. No one's home in there, and he lets Mirabelle forgive him for it. Jeremy is just a foil, not the right man, but the kind of man who could be the right man. This is probably the truest of the movieÂ’s observations: Loves comes, slips away, and we follow it by hints, guesses, and compromises.

I can't decide which gave me the more acute case of the creeps in this movie. Whether it was the nearly unaccountable liveliness of Mirabelle, contrasted with the emptiness of Ray, and fitfulness of Jeremy. Or whether it was what it seemed to mean: that women are wise and alive, and men are half dead, or half boys. If what women want is something like Ray and what they get is something like Jeremy, no wonder they complain about us as much as they do. Wake up, wake up, wake up!