Stardom

In the future, all films about fame should last only 15 minutes. Woody Allen had his Celebrity, and now Denys Arcand, sometimes deemed the French-Canadian Woody Allen for such films as The Decline of the American Empire, has made his statements on the superficiality and transience of modern fame. But the best that can be said for both movies is that they mirror their subject. Stardom has one eloquent shot — the white winter emptiness of the Canadian backwater of Cornwall — and by the time we return to that scene 90 or so minutes later, nothing has really happened.

From that emptiness emerges teen hockey star Tina Menzhal (Jessica Paré), broken-hearted that her long-absent dad won’t be on hand to watch her play. Instead, a local photographer catches her pouting on the ice, and her rise and fall as a supermodel begins. She passes from one obsessed or venal man to another in a passive-aggressive climb to the top, her victims and victimizers including Dan Aykroyd as a sweating restaurateur and Frank Langella as a sadistic diplomat. She’s also passed from one microphone and camera crew to another as Arcand structures the film like an orgy of channel surfing with the same vapid program on every station. The standing joke is that no one ever lets Tina finish a sentence, but eventually it’s clear she has nothing to say. Ending on a note of stunning patriarchal complacency, Stardom proves that fame may come and go but macho pigheadedness goes on forever.

-- Peter Keough