10.22.07

Commentary: Shopgirl - my fantasy is misogyny

Posted in misogyny, opinion, comedy, drama, reviews at 11:39 am by FilmFemme

So, it might be a tiny bit of a stretch to connect this LA Times article by my new favorite person Carina Chocano to my recent viewing of Shopgirl, since it’s not a comedy and does center around a woman, but the article really forced me to reconsider my feelings about the movie. I watched Shopgirl yesterday and I thought it was so charming. And it made me feel really lonely and almost desperate. You know, in a good way.

Then I read this article, which (READ IT!) articulates in a public forum what I’ve been talking about for a long time (oh yeah, I’m totally OG on the oppression of women and how Hollywood perpetuates it…um, not so much). Chocano’s driving question (thesis? no thanks) is basically: WTF happened to good female comedic characters? Shopgirl isn’t a comedy (though there are some really funny parts [”It’s a mint.”]) but there is still this undercurrent, when I look back on it, of Claire Dane’s Mirabelle (something about that name is so fake - and not in a whimsical way, in a way that it was so clearly invented by a man…) being kind of worthless. She is the titular ’shopgirl’ who literally stands at a counter waiting for life to happen to her. It does, in the form of Jason Schwartzman’s Jeremy who she meets at a laundromat (I’m clearly going to the wrong laundromats, because there are never cute hipster boys when I go - just fat women washing sheets and little kids running around screaming) and later Steve Martin’s Ray. Sure, she’s ‘an artist’ and she’s ‘depressed’ and she ‘has a cat’ and I guess the point is that at the end she *does* do something, but it happens so easily that it’s hard to connect her invisible struggle (her depression manifests itself only in laying in bed for a few days when she goes off her meds) with her ultimate success. It doesn’t feel triumphant, it feels just like her chance encounters with either of the guys that form a tenuous ‘love triangle’ with her - lucky. In retrospect (I will heartily admit that I am still smitten with this movie) it is so obvious that this story was written by a man.

Another problem I had with it, even when I was watching it, was that Mirabelle doesn’t seem to have any friends or try to make friends. There is one incredibly brief scene where she is having coffee with some unnamed girls around her age, presumably her friends, and they are giving her relationship advice. ONE time in the yearlong span of the movie. Isn’t that weird? I’ll be the first to admit it’s hard to make girl-friends as a girl in LA, but, I don’t know. I just didn’t buy it. Also, I could never bring myself to suspend disbelief that she had such a great apartment in Los Feliz with no roommates. You guys, it’s not even a studio - it’s a one bedroom! On Griffith Park Blvd! I mean, come on. She works retail. (Also, Ray says he lives near the Observatory and later on says he’s 10 minutes from Saks on Wilshire, in Beverly Hills. No Ray, you’re over an hour from Saks. I get the point plot/characterwise, because he says she can leave clothes at his place, but it still annoyed me.)

So, like I said the relationship of the article to Shopgirl is spotty at best, but I recommend both.

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