Stardom (2000)
(On Cable TV, September 2019) The interesting cinematic conceit on which Stardom is built remains intriguing twenty years later: What if we saw the rise and fall of a supermodel entirely through camera lenses, as if a mad fan collected her TV appearances and home videos in a compilation video? Jessica Paré convincingly stars as a Cornwall (ON) hockey player plucked out of obscurity to become a fashion supermodel, loving and leaving a trail of men in her wake (including a restaurateur played by Dan Aykroyd). Executed at the turn of the century and taking place in a media-saturated environment, Stardom has aged significantly more than many other movies of the time, but it’s already showing signs of being a period piece rather than being dated: the references dwell in the late-1990s, and a circa-2019 take would have more cell phones and social media than we could stand. It does take a few minutes to get used to the collage aspect of the film (save for a brief introduction and a quiet epilogue, we get “in the camera” early on and escape the structure of a typical narrative), but its effectiveness does start to build, especially when we realize that the years are accumulating and the scope of the story is going from Cornwall to New York and places beyond. Could it have been better? Well, yes—as much as it’s enjoyable to piece together the narrative of the protagonist’s life through indirect and often misleading footage, it’s not much of a story. The satire is fine but typical (news reports from the past two decades have made the same point over and over, cutting away from mass tragedy to celebrity gossip) while stock characters abound. Writer-director Denys Arcand does know what he’s doing, though, and the mixture of French-Canadian and English-Canadian actors (plus notables such as Frank Langella) is interesting in its own right. Intriguingly, Stardom does have its built-in distancing mechanism: as interesting as it can be for movie geeks to see a film told through surface footage, there aren’t that many pathways to what the character is thinking or feeling: This is akin to a second-grade biography made of media clippings rather than interviews with the subject. Our protagonist is often used by other people making their own points, which is part of the lesson. Still, Stardom is more than worth a look on a purely experimental level, as an exploration of what cinema can do once it gets away from its own conventions. I’m a bit surprised that the film remains obscure outside Canada, but that’s the nature of non-stardom.
