PRET-A-P0RTER

Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (or, as it was unfortunately dumbed down for American audiences, Ready to Wear) wants to do for the fashion world what M*A*S*H did for war and Nashville did for country music, but it never quite gets there.  Instead of slyly skewering the fashion industry’s vanity and absurdity, it gets caught in a muddled mess of half-hearted satire, poorly sewn subplots, and way too many characters with not enough to say.  The materials are all there, the glamour, the ego, the eccentricity, but Altman, who once masterfully juggled chaos in his ensemble pieces, seems overwhelmed or maybe just uninterested this time.

The film tries to be everything at once...  part behind-the-scenes documentary, part whodunnit, part romantic comedy, and part slapstick farce. It’s so much and yet, at the same time, so very little.  You keep waiting for it to settle into something, a tone, a perspective, a purpose, but it never does.  It’s not that many scenes aren’t visually interesting or occasionally funny, it’s that they don’t cohere into anything more than some individual optic moments... like a pile of mismatched swatches.

The cast list is enormous and stacked with talent.  Julia Roberts, Tim Robbins, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Teri Garr, Kim Basinger, Forest Whitaker, Lauren Bacall, Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman, and on and on, but most of them feel more like name-drops than actual characters. Julia Roberts, in particular, feels shoehorned in for marquee value only.  You often aren't wondering where many of the characters are headed because you just kind of forget they are there until they pop up again. Even Loren and Mastroianni's recreation of their 1963 striptease from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow feels more like a forced nod than anything meaningful.

If the film has any real point, it might be buried in its final act, where a naked fashion show and a cross-dressing convention are juxtaposed. There's a faint indication of commentary here... that all of fashion, and maybe clothing in general, is just one big performance. A costume we put on.  A mask we wear.  But it’s a message that arrives too late and too softly, drowned out by the chaotic noise of everything else.

In the end, Prêt-à-Porter feels like walking into a party with too many people and no real host. You’re never quite sure what you’re supposed to be paying attention to, and after a while, you stop trying.  There are flashes of wit, some genuinely funny bits (Kellerman, Ullman, and Hunt as the fashion magazine editors in particular), and of course, the visual feast of Paris and a real Fashion Week.  Still, none of it adds up to the biting satire the film clearly wants to be.  As Heidi Klum says each week on Project Runway, "In fashion, one day you are in, the next day you're out."  This movie proves the same thing can be said for film directors.