Shopgirl

Mirabelle (Danes) sells gloves in upmarket department store Saks and, at night, returns to a bedsit on the fringes of Los Angeles for another evening of urban alienation. She strikes up a brief dalliance with kooky broke Jeremy (Schwartzman) and we get the sense that she has a mind of porcelain - easily shattered, with one or two hairline cracks already inflicted. It doesn't take off with Jeremy and he joins a touring band, his character kept in a holding pattern until he can play his role in the denouement. And so we move into the main concern of the movie: Mirabelle's seduction by rich businessman Ray Porter (Martin) and their subsequent relationship.

Like Lost In Translation, this is a May-September relationship between a young woman (Clare Danes is in her mid-twenties) and an older man played by a comic legend, (Steve Martin is in his sixties). Whereas Lost In Translation explored the relationship from the female perspective and kept it flirtatious if platonic, Shopgirl is from the older man's point of view, being an adaptation of the star's novel, and it is not platonic.

"Do you have a good relationship with your father?" Porter asks Mirabelle, weighing up his chances with her. It is discomforting to watch, not least because Steve Martin's face has the texture of shaved rubber. Watching an ageing actor get the young girl in an adaptation of his own novel... well, the author is hardly sitting at one remove paring his fingernails, he's centrestage having sex with the heroine. Thematically, this is a film about how we connect with one another in the lonely modern world, and Shopgirl advances a fatherly view of sexuality that makes a virtue of diminishing potency - women are made to feel like women by being touched - not through vigorous sexual congress. Roy Porter's surrogate father seduction technique - buying her gifts, promising to protect her - combined with Martin's unusual face makes you feel like they're having sex while he wears a Dad mask.

Director Anand Tucker never passes up an opportunity to enrich or add meaning through his moves and framing; unfortunately the emotions here are so slight that such ostentation only adds to the stately vanity of the affair. Mirabelle unspools under Porter's reluctance to commit and her decision to stop taking her medication. Our sympathies with her character are disengaged once we discover her behaviour is a product of malfunctioning chemicals - in fact, anti-depressants break the contract between character and audience at a fundamental level: how can we invest and identify with a personality that can be altered so arbitrarily? And is this why the infamous adaptation of Prozac Nation was such an unreleasable failure?