the huntress; In her new film "Going Shopping", Victoria Foyt explores the reasons we splash out on pretty things.(Interview)

Byline: Gaby Woods

I shop like a general," Victoria Foyt tells me as we drive the few short blocks between her favorite boutiques in Santa Monica. "I know what I like; I know what I'll wear a lot; I can't be persuaded to buy anything." With her searing green eyes and dark, jaw-length hair, Foyt looks like she stepped out of thirties Hollywood straight into her shiny black Jag. "I'm not a dilettante shopper," she adds, her voice rippling into dizzy laughter. "I'm more like someone who's planning a campaign!"

Today's battlefront is Montana Avenue, the setting of Going Shopping, Foyt's latest film with her former husband, the Hollywood maverick Henry Jaglom, in which she becomes to shopping what Woody Allen is to psychoanalysis. Foyt co-wrote it and plays the owner of a clothing store who will lose her beloved business unless she sells enough clothes to pay the rent. The action takes place over a single anxiety-ridden weekend and is interrupted by unscripted interviews to camera, in which women bare their feelings about shopping. "It's primal," says one. "I shop like a man eats," says another. "I think if people could wear something new every day, there would be no such thing as depression."

"When you're shopping," Foyt explains as she leads me into Savannah, a high-end temple of modernism, "how you feel about yourself, your weight, your age, your relationship, your past, your future-everything is right there in that moment. It's: Who am I buying this dress for? how is it going to make me feel? where am I going to wear it? why don't I have somewhere great to wear it? There's a panoply of issues that comes crashing in on you when you negotiate the simplest transaction."

Foyt thinks all women hold themselves to "impossible standards": "Who doesn't go into a dressing room and have a moment of visionary readjustment?" she asks. Initially, shopping wasn't something that Foyt looked at "with an introspective eye." Women talk about shopping all the time, she realized, but not about how it affects them. As work on the movie progressed, and 70 women were interviewed in the process, she began to see her own "blind spots" and "barriers to self-acceptance." Her particular area of sensitivity, she says, is her hips. Her feet are so narrow that she "just can't wear inexpensive shoes." She favors Jil Sander and Prada, Ferragamo and Manolos. Though she dislikes vintage clothing as a rule ("There's something about the tactile energy next to my own skin that's never appealed to me"), she collects vintage Italian jewelry and is wearing a chunky gold Deco bracelet when we meet. When you shop with someone, Foyt and the film suggest, you learn of their most intimate idiosyncrasies.

Foyt is not immune to the shopper's addictive hope that a certain item might change one's life. She remembers a floor-length black velvet Norma Kamali ensemble as "a gift from God" and reminisces about a trip to Paris with Jaglom in the early nineties. "Sabrina was on the way, I think, or about to be on the way," she says, "and we went into Christian Dior and bought this faux-fur red bomber jacket with a satin tie. I still have it. And I thought when we bought it, Wow, my life will change because of this. It was one of those things that made me feel like I had one foot in the movie of my life. Because for that one moment, everything was so perfect."

The first time Foyt met Jaglom, she wore a little black dress and bright-red lipstick. They had already fallen in love over the phone: She was in a play and happened to be helping out at the box office when he called to buy a ticket. They spoke for eight hours that day, "and the next day again, and the next day again," says Foyt, so that she thought, Wow, I love this person; I know this person; I feel completely known. When they eventually met, the first thing he said to her was "Do you always wear that lipstick?" "And a flash went ...