Denys Arcand’s latest film is a somewhat fascinating look at stardom and fame, as well as the silliness of professional modeling.  But the fact that Stardom fixes a cynical magnifying glass on these show business buffoons isn’t what makes the film interesting.  Arcand’s film, which shows the rise and fall of a teenage supermodel, is shown entirely through clips of television shows, telethons, news reports and talk shows.

This gimmicky concept reminded me of “Fan Mail,” a Ronald Munson novel about a psychopath stalking a female newscaster.  The book wasn’t particularly interesting, or well-written, but the draw was that the story was narrated entirely by e-mail, faxes, letters and memos. Stardom is the film equivalent of “Fan Mail.”

Even more interesting than Stardom’s unique narrative structure is the fact that it was the closing night film at Cannes and the opening night film at Toronto’s festival.  Both events pack in celebrities like nobody’s business, and the famous seemed to react quite positively to the film, even though it pretty much portrayed the lot of them as gluttonous morons.  Go figure.

Newcomer Jessica Paré stars as Tina Menzhal, a comely cross between Liv Tyler and Ione Skye, who, as the film opens, is a frizzy-haired woman’s hockey player in Cornwall, Ontario.  Through a series of freaky coincidences, a photograph of Tina lands in the right pair of hands, and she literally wakes up to a life of fame and celebrity.

Tina’s new modeling career whisks her off to New York, Paris and Milan, where she rubs elbows with pretentious personalities at trendy restaurants, goofy celebrity events and fundraisers, all of which are recorded by various media sources.  She doesn’t seem to mind that interviewers never let her finish a sentence, or when they refer to her as having been “raised in the wilderness.”  Tina begins a series of affairs with older men that she would never find herself attracted to (like Dan Aykroyd, Diamonds, and Frank Langella, The Ninth Gate).

But, like any star devoid of talent, Tina’s career begins to bottom out.  It’s predictable and uninteresting, aside from the fact that the very cameras that made her famous are also being used to record her downfall.  More appealing is the effect of Tina on Aykroyd’s character, which plays as a new cinematic lesson for skirt-chasing men in the midst of a midlife crisis.

Arcand (Jesus of Montreal), who co-wrote Stardom’s script with newcomer Jacob Potashnik, does an admirable job of piecing together the different media sources into a (somewhat) coherent film.  But the film, which has the vibe of a VH-1 original movie, or something made for E! Television, just goes on for too long.  It would have been nice as an 80-minute picture, but Stardom stretches Tina’s 15 minutes of fame into a nearly two-hour film.

1:42 – for brief nudity, adult language and situations