Glove puppet

Critical Mass: Shopgirl

Slate says Shopgirl “marks an advance – and a dip – in Martin's creative trajectory”. The movie has Claire Danes as Mirabelle, who sells gloves at a department store, and is wooed by slacker type Jeremy (Jason Schwartzman), before being charmed by Ray (Martin), an emotionally unavailable but loaded ex-computer business brain.

The film is “an aching reverie in the tradition of Lost in Translation and In the Mood for Love about the vast distances between people who are locked (or have locked themselves) in their own heads”. But it is among the most “non-eventful romantic triangles ever committed to celluloid”. The best performance, says Slate, is by Bridgette Wilson-Sampras as the conniving slut at the perfume counter. Her big scene is “farcical, filthy, surprising”, but the rest of the movie is “sadly vacuous”.

Not so, says the New York Times. Hollywood cuts yards of what it calls romantic comedy from bolts of synthetic cloth. The elegant and “exquisitely tailored” Shopgirl “puts most of them to shame”. Looking as it does at the story of a young woman looking for love in modern LA, the movie “reveals what is missing from most others of its kind: the fact of sex and the possibility of heartbreak, which is to say the very conditions of romance itself”. American commercial cinema is happy to crack dirty jokes and sing maudlin hymns to matrimony, says NY Times, but Shopgirl, which is both funny and sweetly sad, “aims for something other than salaciousness or sentimentality”.

Salon for its part, found things to like – mainly Claire Danes – but “it's basically a dreadful film that should never have been made”. Danes, Salon says brings “her appealing, off-balance combination of gawkiness and sexual hunger to the role”. But it gives her no coherent social context, and Jeremy is just “an assemblage of groan-inducing slacker stereotypes that Martin and director Anand Tucker apparently see as a satirical portrayal of Today's Younger Generation”.

Sure, some of Martin's early movies are silly and fun and some of his mid-period ones, like Roxanne and LA Story, are enjoyably sweet. But scenes in Shopgirl like Ray sweeping her from out behind her counter “is a trite and slightly unpleasant theme that cries out for original handling and doesn't get it here”. Martin's performance also “is one of implacable, rubberized unhappiness”.

There's also little sexual chemistry between the actors. It's supposed to seem old-fashionedly muted and tasteful and real. “When it's really just art decoration for an aging celebrity's unpleasant fantasy.”