Day 21 - Pret A Porter (1994)

Just a quickie today, as despite my best efforts, my blogging efforts are finally being hampered again by the need to actually go out and earn some money.

So, we have Robert Altman's Pret-A-Porter. I'm typing it without the accents because if I took the time to find them it might necessitate me skipping breakfast, and believe me, you wouldn't like me when I'm hungry. Anyway, imagine if Christopher Guest did a mockumentary about fashion and basically cast every single celebrity he could bribe with flights to Paris plus absolutely everybody else who was already there, and you'll get the general idea. 

The critics said it was a mess, Karl Lagerfeld threatened to sue, and the IMDB userbase wasn't too enthralled either. Altman, meanwhile, said it was a silly little film and no big deal, implying that it was drawing an awful lot of attention for something so inconsequential. Could this have been a reference to the fashion industry itself?

The good

This has to be one of the most dazzling casts ever assembled for a single movie. I'm not going to list everybody, but highlights include Sophia Loren, Lauren Bacall and Marcello Mastroianni, plus more recognisable modern names such as Julia Roberts, Stephen Rea and Richard E Grant. It's arguable, of course, whether anybody has more than an extended cameo, but there's definitely fun to be gained from star-spotting as you go along. If fashion happens to be an interest of yours, it gets even better - I noticed Jean-Paul Gaultier and (I think) Linda Evangelista, but I'm fairly sure the film features dozens more big names.

It goes without saying, however there's no point in employing half the world's celebrities if you don't give them anything interesting to do. There's a plot here, or at least half a plot, about a possible murder and the launch of the ready to wear fashion collections that lend the film its name. Mostly, however, this is a character piece, giving us glimpses of the lives of the protagonists and the exclusive world they inhabit. 

It works, for the most part, by being consistently engaging. The characters aren't likeable but they're certainly interesting, and I watched with a sort of delighted horror. Altman isn't above stripping them of their dignity, either, as illustrated by a running gag that has the fashion world's highest and mightiest walking through beautifully lit, beautifully composed shots and then stepping in dogshit.

The bad

Pret a Porter is guilty as charged, I suppose. It's slight, yes, and there's not much in the way of a story, and it can be hard to keep track of all the characters if you worry about that sort of thing. I decided early on, however, that I was simply going to enjoy it on a moment-by-moment basis, which seemed to work pretty well - from that point onwards, I didn't have a problem with keeping track of who was who.

Do summer action flicks really have a monopoly on permissible shallowness, though?

The verdict

I hadn't been sure before I watched, but Pret A Porter actually turned out to be something of a treat, as beautiful and witty and shallow and emptyheaded as the industry it simultaneously celebrates and lampoons.