When Chantal Akerman, the most consistently innovative European director of the post-Godard generation, announced plans to make a "million dollar musical" (The Golden Eighties, since retitled Window Shopping), to be set in a shopping mall, she had some convincing to do. Ironically, her pilot/rehearsal film was a critical success on its own ("Akerman's most playful, purely pleasurable film" -J. Hoberman). "Between a script and a movie, one must go through a whole landscape," Chantal Akerman wrote. This film is that landscape, edited from some forty hours of videotaped rehearsals in which repetition, gesture, inflection lend humanity to the banalities of the text while, at the same time, underscoring the role-playing. Roles are performed by actors who never appear in the final version, genders reversed, and the inversions are a brilliant trope in relation to the musical itself, which looks nothing like what leads up to it. "...This is how through reality we arrive at fiction" (Akerman).