Preachers, as a rule, rarely follow their own preaching. Indeed, some of the soundest advice arises from a suppressed guilty conscience. In Confessions of a Shopaholic, a rave magazine columnist counsels people on how to be thrifty. What her editor and readers would be mortified to know is that she’s actually an obsessive-compulsive shopping addict.
When mannequins hug a broke, jobless girl and successfully coax her to purchase the expensive stuff they wear, you can be sure that she’s suffering from a serious addiction that’s blurring her senses. Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) has twelve credit cards and is nose-deep in debts, but her eyes light up and she’s elated each time she walks by a store. Her buying sprees give her a false feeling of very-short-lived happiness.
The protagonist is a girl next door with glitter in her eyes, a love for delusionary fashionable wearables, and an insatiable urge to splurge. Her story of addiction exhibits the damaging consequences of a plastic money culture. It shows that some of the most successful people whom the public look up to in awe may possibly be complete failures in their private lives. What this famous economic adviser needs is not more admirers but a therapy that can somehow cure her.
The hyper-excited Fisher, though she lives a lie, is a delightful comic. Her eyes dance and her entire body thrills with exuberance each time she meets a fashionable item on display. And this is very often. She’s cheerful. She’s bubbly. And she throws her lines rapidly in a manner that makes it seem natural and improvised. And when she’s embarrassed, it shows funnily all over her face.
In contrast, the actor who plays her boss, Hugh Dancy, is a calm and poised prince charming straight out of a Mills and Boon novel. Their chemistry is lovely. The moment you see them for the first time you know their lives are destined to cross, that they would soon be in each other’s arms, and that they are designed to inspire each other.
PJ Hogan stimulates a woman’s wardrobe fantasies with a swirl of rich colors and designs. And temptingly invites window shoppers to enter a world where they can destroy themselves economically by getting an addictive hands-on-feel of the textures of their dreams. But he also emphasizes on the liberating power that comes of being able to fully resist the lure of the mannequins.
