GOING SHOPPING 4 Dresses and a Handbag

Rating: 80%


(http://www.sfgate.com)

Also Known As:

Unknown

Version:

Language:

Length:

106 minutes: Uncut

Review Format:

DVD

Year:

2005

Country:

Predominant Genre:

Comedy

Director:

Outstanding Performances:

None

Premiss:

A clothing designer tries to save her struggling boutique store by having a tumultuous weekend sale of her shop’s inventory by playing on the shopping addictions of her customers.

Themes:

Advertising

Alienation

Curative

Destiny

Emotional repression

Family

Friendship

Guilt

Identity

Individualism

Loneliness

Love

Materialism

Narcissism

Personal

Political

Preventive

Rationality

Schizophrenia

Self-Esteem

Sexual Repression

Solipsism

Stereotyping

White culture

White privilege

White supremacy

Similar to:

Unknown

You Are What You Wear

Buying the Right Feeling

Shopaholics Synonymous

Summary: Caucasians imagining they can buy their way out of their endemic misery.

Highly-amusing insight into the peculiar shopping needs of White women. The narcissism, the emotional neediness and the materialism, as well as the vacant-eyed and self-fulfilling desire for one to become what one wears, rather than what one is, because one is, in fact, not much in particular.

Such an attitude is the result of psychological laziness and the desire for the instant satisfaction that the superficiality of White culture can never provide. Like alcohol, consumerism provokes the desire while denying the gratification: It is a mere substitute for something that can only come from a life of hard work and effort: Self-respect.

It is almost as if Whites have no emotional hinterland and can only pretend to be someone they are not, so long as they wear the clothes they think fit the image of the person they wish to be - even though they know nothing about the people they wish to be, beyond appearance. (Like people with painted smiles who think that they will eventually become real smiles.) This is emphasized by the Characters of Color speaking like dark-colored Whites in an exclusively-White psychological context.

Personal relationships become impossible in a world where people only choose to relate to each other’s personae rather than their characters - the latter of which, here, are practically non-existent.

This White need to be liked, but not liking oneself enough to know if one is actually likable, hampers personal growth; leading to becoming trapped with those of a similarly-meek disposition because the truly likable people shun you. This is an often-deliberate means of avoiding growing up; leaving one powerless to define ones own identity and, thereby, achieve success through it. The resulting psychological depression is sublimated through by shopping (& talking about shopping) - an addiction that vainly tries to mask feelings of powerlessness.

The distinction between shopping and consuming is not clear, here, so that browsing and buying goods that you do not really need (or can afford) becomes an activity as valorized as it is critiqued. However, the performances are excellent, with a genuine human warmth that reveals real insight into the characters of the women presented.

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