FFWD Weekly
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Film by Jaime Frederick It is hardly a great revelation that the world of haute couture is a shallow, superficial place populated with vacuous, image-conscious people whose values are suspect at best. Nevertheless, director Denys Arcand spends much of his latest film, Stardom, belabouring just that point with disappointing results from the Quebecois filmmaker who has given us such memorable films as The Decline of the American Empire and Jesus of Montreal. It’s unfortunate that Stardom falls so flat as satire because it sets out to say some fairly interesting things about our media-saturated world and our obsession with celebrity. Apparently, Arcand has become too enamoured with his own cleverness – the film rarely moves beyond its rather shapeless narrative structure to actually deliver any fatal blows to its shallow subjects. It’s exactly the same problem that Woody Allen faced in his undeniably similar picture, Celebrity – the rambling, amorphous visual style of these films, presumably designed to force media-savvy viewers to reckon with their desire to see candid images of the stars whose lives they devour, ultimately results in dull, pedantic artistic statements about the double-edged nature of fame. In Stardom, Jessica Paré plays a teenage hockey sensation from Cornwall, Ontario, who becomes the hottest commodity the runways of Paris and Milan have ever seen. The film follows her rise to superstardom as a supermodel, and works in rather obvious riffs about the charming girl next door who becomes an insensitive domineering opportunist in thrall to whichever man can further her career at any given moment. It’s as unflattering an image of celebrity as we’ve ever seen, but it’s also totally uninspired. If Arcand had made this film seven or eight years ago, it might have been timely and prescient, but at the moment his ideas are only rehashing those examined by Allen in Celebrity and even earlier by Robert Altman in Prêt-à-Porter. We already know the fashion world is a shallow and superficial place, and we also know that the obsession that Western culture has with models and other celebrities is ridiculous and unhealthy. Where Altman revelled in showing us that our modern day emperors aren’t really wearing any clothes, Arcand can only tell us that if they were, we’d all be much better off.

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