Stiletto Heel

By RICHARD CORLISS

When you hear the word French, you may think of elegance, hauteur and haute couture. When Robert Altman hears the word, he thinks of farce, polluted rivers and dog doo under everyone's foot. Pret-a-Porter (Ready to Wear) is the director's long-winded hate letter to the fashion industry and those who cover it. The film is a flaccid mess, missing its easy targets. It is also undiluted Altman -- a movie that sums up his attitude toward actors, audiences, the press, humanity. When you hear the word contempt, you think of Robert Altman.

Fashion is in a particularly ugly, aimless, self-parodying phase at the moment, so perhaps it deserves a chronicler as cynical as this one. Anyway, a cynic is what it got during the industry's big pret-a-porter shows in Paris last spring, when Altman mingled with the modish elite and found room in his film for many of them: designers Christian Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier and Issey Miyake, models Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington and CNN fashion maven Elsa Klensch.

The movie weaves its little stories into this big scene. A designer (Anouk Aimee) fights a takeover by a Texan (Lyle Lovett). A photographer (Stephen Rea) toys with three magazine editors (Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman, Tracey Ullman). Two reporters (Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts in a nice little sketch) cover the story from their hotel bedroom. Two handsome Italians (Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni) replay an old love affair. And a FAD-TV reporter (Kim Basinger) chirpily reports every outrage on the runways and in the salons.

As MASH was to war movies, Nashville to country music, A Wedding to the middle-class family, H.E.A.L.T.H. to the organic-food business and The Player to Hollywood, so is Ready to Wear to fashion: a comic panorama of people pretending to get along under stress, creating a bogus community, playing games of power and privilege, establishing who's boss. The tone of an Altman film -- the desperate milling, the sense of isolation within a crowd, the urgency to no clear end -- is the reflection of life on any movie set and, indeed, in the working lives of most people. When the scheme works, as in MASH and The Player, it does so by giving people something fresh to do and witty to say. Then the bile has an urgent, instructive tang. It's called satire.

But Ready to Wear, which Altman wrote with Barbara Shulgasser, is a high concept poorly executed. Too often the characters are simply mannequins for nasty jokes. What, for example, is the essence of the fashion doyenne played by Lauren Bacall? That she is color-blind, and that her friends apparently don't tell her she's wearing shoes of different shades. Why is Danny Aiello, as a buyer for a Chicago store, in the film? So he can cross-dress in a Chanel suit. At 60, Loren looks great, in or out of her array of glorious millinery, but it's cruel to have her and Mastroianni reprise the strip-tease scene from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with a cheap new punch line. Kellerman must endure the same naked shame she did a quarter-century ago in MASH. The heart sighs for these game folks. So much effort expended to so little effect.

Never blame actors; their mission is to do whatever their director tells them. Blame Altman, whose mission here was to assemble some of the most glamorous performers in world cinema for a mass hazing, a humiliation on camera. He is like the scuzzy photographer played by Rea: he finds people eager to make unedifying fools of themselves, takes their picture, takes some money and calls it art. And he has done to his actresses what male fashion designers so often do to their models and customers: make beautiful women look ridiculous. Imitation is the sincerest form of parody.

Ready to Wear isn't about pricey clothes; Altman has no more interest or expertise in them than he did in country music when he made Nashville. Here he wanted only to find a new arena for his worst impulses. This strategy of derision exhausted itself ages ago. But for Altman, contempt never goes out of fashion.