Going Shopping (2005)

SHOPAHOLICS ANONYMOUS An indie auteur continues to be fascinated by L.A.'s women

There are many things to be said — and a lot of critics have — to disparage the films of Henry Jaglom, with their indulgent klatches of talk, their L.A. neurotics chewing the cud of their own problems. Yet let's give Jaglom his due. In the '90s, when he began to turn his low-budget spotlight on the wishes and woes of contemporary women, pouring their dilemmas into encounter-group comedies like Eating (1990) and Babyfever (1994), he anticipated the exuberant socio-comic confusions of Sex and the City. Going Shopping, Jaglom's latest, is an agreeable ramble, a quasi-doc soap-opera meditation on clothes and the holy pursuit of them. Victoria Foyt, who co-wrote the film, stars as Holly, owner of a vintage boutique she's trying to dig out from under a pile of debt. Foyt, who has the winsome sculpted beauty of a middle-aged pixie, plays all of Holly's anxieties — single mom, lone entrepreneur — without shortchanging her joie de vivre. In the past, Jaglom has overstated feminine self-doubt, turning it into self-flagellation, but Going Shopping is sharp and funny about all the things that shopping can mean to the women who live to do it, and even to those who don't.