STARDOM

Denys Arcand = director
Jessica Pare = Tina Menzhal
Dan Aykroyd = Barry Levine

reviewed by Joanne Yamaguchi and Gus Calabrese
at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)

Clicking on some of the photos and text will run video clips


Frank Langella
Denys Arcand, prolific and brilliant director from Quebec, presents the Toronto International Film Festival with yet another perfect profile of cultural layers of hypocrisy. Stardom is a hard focus both psychologically and physically on the layers of sham and degradation constituting glamorous modern life. Le declin de l'empire americain (86) was a long shot version of the theme. Le declin centered on a cluster of hypocritical wealthy adventurers. The metonymy between the Roman and the American empires is convincing. Le declin was a sexy, beauteous implementation of a sociological small groups lab. Accounts of the fall of the Roman Empire center around a small group. Most stories of declining and falling seem to engage a small group of players.

In Stardom, the group grows both smaller and larger. Numerically the center becomes a group of one, the teenage Tina. Dan Aykroyd's Barry Levine provides backup for the Tina solo. Aykroyd is nearly a revered object of Americana by now. He can play the superficial, pragmatic, vulgar American par excellence. He now plays straight the satirical bits that he and Steve Martin used to do on Saturday Night Live. Psychically the center becomes the penumbral ubiquity of falseness surrounding Tina. Like Ophelia, Tina loses herself. She becomes indistinguishable to herself, from the madding crowd.

Stardom is deliciously referential. Media is demonized - not unlike the situation with Princess Di. The implied moral weight of the Princess Di event resounds within the portal of Denys Arcand's Tina. Tina is a supermodel; Princess Di was a royal supermodel.

 

 


Stardom can be criticized for being a superficial treatment of Tina's superficial life. However, Stardom, in making a point about superficiality by displaying surfaces only becomes a late stepchild of phenomenological work that indulges surfaces only. This can be regarded as a virtue. It is not necessarily ironical, nor a flaw. After all, if we wanted to delve deeply into Tina's psyche, why not a mockumentary of her?

For those of us with a sweet tooth, the glitz of Arcand's Stardom is preferable to a sociology lecture.