More frills, less substance -- Confessions of a Shopaholic

More frills, less substance -- Confessions of a Shopaholic

Confessions of a Shopaholic

Genre: Comedy

Director: P. J. Hogan

Cast: Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, Joan Cusack, Kristin Scott Thomas

Storyline: A compulsive shopper learns the error of her ways in the gentlest manner possible.

Bottomline: Formidable talent goes waste in this shallow confection.

All of us know timing is everything in comedy. ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ suffers from a fatal lack of it. We are not talking of the cast — Isla Fisher is a formidable comic talent and manages wonderfully well. The timing we are speaking of is the release of a film about conspicuous consumption during such financially-troubling times.

When a character says that America is managing fine despite being in an even greater credit card debt, one can only cringe. And that is just one of the troubles with this brightly-coloured confection. There is also the problem of excess.

Too edgy, too couture

The colours are too bright, the music too sappy, the characters too shrill and the clothes too edgy, too couture, too everything. By the end of the movie you feel like you have drunk too much coffee and eaten too much sugar — all wired up with empty calories and slightly sick. Based on Sophie Kinsella’s bestselling novels, ‘Shopaholic’ tells the story of Rebecca Bloomwood, who loves to shop and dreams of working in a fashion magazine, ‘Alette.’ When an opening is filled in-house, she decides on the cunning plan of joining the financial magazine of the same publishing house as her ticket into ‘Alette.’

Rebecca with her maxed out credit cards and a debt collector at her door seems hardly the right person to be handing out savings advice, but she does and her highly original way of looking at finance wins her a huge following and the admiration of her dreamy-looking boss, Luke Brandon. Then everything goes wrong. Rebecca learns the error of her ways and all is well that ends well.

Patricia Fields who designed costumes for the ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ and ‘Sex and the City’ (the series and the movie) conclusively proves that designing for the big screen is just not her cup of tea. Carrie and company carried off her clothes on telly just fine, but on the big screen, the clothes have a distracting amount of accessories. That was the case in ‘Prada’ and here they are guaranteed to give retinal fatigue.

The cast is competent and as mentioned earlier, Fisher is outstanding as Rebecca. Cusack is suitably vague as Rebecca’s mum while Kristin Scott Thomas has a blast as the glacial editor of ‘Alette.’ Just wish the movie had less dressing and more substance.