It is said of the director Robert Altman, as it is occasionally said of sex and beer, that even when it's bad it's still very, very good.
That theory gets the test of its life in Altman's new "Ready to Wear," which until two weeks ago was called "Pret-a-Porter." The film applies the same broad-brush, multi-plotted, satirical approach to Fashion Week, when the new season's designs are strutted on the runways of Paris, as Altman has before applied to Nashville and to the stories of Raymond Carver in last year's "Short Cuts." The results aren't nearly so edifying, however.
The movie just isn't very well thought out. To the very small degree that there's any story at all, the film is structured around the mysterious death of the much-hated and powerful head (Jean-Pierre Cassel) of a fashion institute. For reasons that make no narrative sense at all, however, we've seen the man die in the back seat of his limousine by choking on a ham sandwich. So even though detectives are dispatched, and they wander through Fashion Week giving us our entree into that world, we know what they don't: There's no murder. Thus the central suspense mechanism of the movie is: waiting for an autopsy report.
Through this overarching situation thread a dizzying number of other stories and nonstories, some related, some not, none particularly resonant or memorable. It's amusing that reporters from the Washington Post and Houston Chronicle are forced to share a room when they're ordered to stay in Paris to follow the murder. And it's more amusing that they -- Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts -- never get out of the room, or even the sack. They spend the week cribbing stories off CNN to file back home; that is, in their brief assays into verticality before they return to the horizontal. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else.
Oh, let's see, in no particular order: The editors of the three most influential fashion magazines (Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman and Tracey Ullman) struggle bitterly to sign hot fashion photographer Stephen Rea to an exclusive contract; he in turn cynically uses his leverage to debase and humiliate them. There's a gay-gay-gay-straight romantic quadrangle between the two couples that run two hot fashion houses. There's a tottering "classic" house that's being bought by a Texas cowboy boot millionaire. There's a stiff middle-class guy (Danny Aiello) who turns out to be this year's most overdone cliche: the cross dresser. Marcello Mastroianni pursues Sophia Loren for obscure purposes, not that anyone cares because neither ever becomes human. Finally, Kim Basinger is made to seem even more coltish and awkward as a TV correspondent who clearly doesn't get it.
Yet none of these dramatic inventions can quite match what Altman's cameras are capturing almost incidentally, and what is by far the most impressive about the film: that is, the actual fashion week, an explosion of beauty, fabric and surrealism, unfolding everywhere. The models strut up and down the runways on their yards of leg, pouty mouths and goddessy faces; the designers hustle, sweat, issue vibrations of catastrophe; and the flashbulbs fire off volleys of musketry at Waterloo.
Why couldn't Altman tap into that excitement and send it swirling through his movie? But no: "Ready to Wear," though it boasts a few small delights, is unready to see.
'Ready to Wear'
Starring Kim Basinger, Sophia Loren, Tim Robbins, Lauren Bacall and Julia Roberts
Directed by Robert Altman
Released by Miramax
Rated R
**