Word: altmans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...those who crave fashion, Robert Altman's "Ready to Wear" serves up a multi-course feast. If you're the kind who rises early on Saturday mornings to watch "Style" with Elsa Klensch, you'll gorge yourself with celebrity sightings, feeling very in-the-know when you recognize Sonia Rykiel's signature red hair across a crowded room. However, those who think Gaultier is a sort of scruffy beard will find "Pret-a-Porter" about as filling as a stingy hors d'oeuvre tray...
...Altman's fashion farrago: Ready to Wear, unfit to be seen...
...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...
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...