Having grown up in Montreal, it saddens me immensely to admit that fellow Montrealer Denys Arcand’s Stardom missed its mark completely. Even when I watched his Decline of the American Empire (without English subtitles, as part of a French class assignment), I understood and appreciated Arcand’s satirical attack on suburban materialism and the resulting mediocrity that plagues the middle-class. How can a "mockumentary" on the rise and fall of a supermodel be so comparatively boring and lackluster? What should have been an engaging Cinderella story laced with ecstasy is simply self-indulgent overkill using camp humor that falls flat within the first thirty minutes.

Tina Menzhal (played by Liv Tyler’s Canadian look-alike, Jessica Paré) is a teenager from Cornwall, Ontario who gets discovered by a sports photographer. She is immediately whisked away to a modeling agency where she is plucked, moisturized and offered as commodity to the "label names" of Montreal, New York and Paris. As "fresh meat" to be devoured by magazine covers and runways, Tina is still too naïve and pure to be successful. It is only upon pairing off with a French-Canadian photographer, notorious for womanizing and capitalizing on his youthful models, that she begins to make her mark in the fashion world. When Tina makes her moves on a married New Yorker, a restaurant owner who caters to the "beautiful people", her career takes off, followed closely by the tabloid paparazzi. In fact, Tina’s every move is documented by a "dare-to-be-queer" fashion photographer Bruce Taylor (Robert Lepage), who assumes the role of a voyeuristic voice of reason, acting as both a friend and invader to the rising supermodel.

By the time Tina marries a Canadian UN ambassador nearly three times her age, we are hardly surprised to realize that she is a fallen angel whose beauty was her downfall. It is Tina’s beauty that draws men to fall in love with her, and her beauty that turns them cruel. But who exactly is the victim here, and are we actually supposed to care about a trite beauty queen whose vanity and lack of intelligence make her all the more attractive to the obsessive appetites of a vapid pop culture?

Most of what you see in Stardom is a collage of news clips, talk-show interviews and cinema-verité footage from Taylor’s documentary. Consequently, what you see and hear about Tina is always filtered through the media and the pettiness inherent amongst the rich and fashionable. Whether we laugh at such embellishments or shake our heads at their criticisms, the message is loud, clear and incredibly redundant. The decadent world of fashion and our cultural obsession with celebrities are the product of our own depravity. To critique it, we must turn a critical eye upon our own behavior and assume responsibility for our culture’s incessant decline. This lesson in hyper-realism is worth a *1/2 rating.

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