..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Shopgirl

Directed by Anand Tucker
Touchstone Picures

A bittersweet sliver adapted from Steve Martin's novella of the same name, Shopgirl (***) is genteel melodrama. Director Anand Tucker's first shot has a keen inexorability, the widescreen frame floating into a close-up of Clare Danes' extravagant features-full nose, glistening eyes, lipsticked lips-butch as all get-out in some shots, unaccountably vulnerable in others. Tucker announces: this whirlpool we are pulled toward will take others down, too. As photographed by versatile, sophisticated cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (A History of Violence), there are several horizontal renditions of Los Angeles, from the Silver Lake of Mirabelle Buttersfield, Danes' pickup-driving Saks shopgirl dependant upon anti-depressants; the moneyed enclaves of the wealthy, older Ray Porter (Martin), who pursues her without sharing his sense of limited boundaries; and the public-space effusions of giddy young Jeremy (Jason Schwartzmann), a foot-in-mouth twentysomething stencil artist. Genteel comic melodrama throughout, it's an interesting follow-up for the director of the sweeping Hilary and Jackie.

Martin's script is quietly witty in all its particulars, and while its age-challenged central romance means the story is not always about Mirabelle but also Ray's inevitable indignities as he wriggles and clumsily connives and compartmentalizes. But the filmmakers worship Danes like Ray might contemplate Mirabelle - a plush object, smooth skinned, limber, incomprehensible, desirable. Under L.A. streetlights as Mirabelle drives crosstown behind bookish glasses, her eyes are smashingly green; her tears when she impulsively goes off her meds because she feels happy are wrenching; and Tucker and Suschitzky apportion more than thirty sequences of camera-caress upon Mirabelle/Danes' calves and bare feet. (No complaint here: it's just the most blatant refrain in the movie.) There are overly earnest Barber-esque swells to Barrington Pheloung's swamp of a score but three broody songs by Mark Kozalek are apt.

- Ray Pride