FOR A SATIRE ON celebrity and all-pervasive media, Stardom is remarkably flat and listless. Purportedly what we're seeing onscreen is a channel-surfing collage of varied TV programs, from Entertainment Weekly spoofs to a hyperactive MTV parody, from fake news broadcasts to a pseudo-Jerry Springer talk show complete with bossy black women in the audience; but all of these (save the obligatory documentary, in "truthful" black and white) are filmed with the same bright, crisp, two-dimensional style. None of the fictional programs is given any individual flair, any kick of its own. While this cookie-cutter sameness is very much the point, the visual monotony gives the lie to this smug put-down of our obsessions with TV and the beautiful people it celebrates. Stardom plays like a string of gags about television put together by someone who has never deigned to watch any of it.

While it is an undeniably clever, even wicked idea to trace the rise and fall of fashion model Tina Menzhal (Jessica Paré) solely through talk shows, fashion reports, and celebrity profiles--a series of superficial insights into a supremely superficial individual--one can't help feeling that co-writer/director Denys Arcand opted for the method because he found his subject as banal and vapid as do any of the babbling talking heads or monstrous suitors who come to plague her. Shot into fame for her physical appearance alone, Tina gets her 15 minutes without anyone stopping to wonder what she might be thinking along the way. There is nothing original or particularly insightful in the journey Tina takes from small-town beauty to toast of New York runways, but the cameras keep rolling and the grotesquely obnoxious interviewers keep asking their inane questions regardless. Arcand's typical method of restoring outsized concepts--urban isolation, serial killers, Jesus--to recognizably human dimensions gets turned upside down here: Tina and the media frenzy that surrounds her are viewed as nothing but mindless fluff, but they're given a bloated sense of their own self-importance. Even a report on mass murder in Algeria gets bumped when news comes that Tina's checked into an emergency ward.

The lack of all proportion extends to the actors, almost all of whom are encouraged to deliver nothing but nasty, distorted caricatures. (Hard to say which is flabbier, Dan Aykroyd's hammed-up performance as a restaurateur who dumps wife and children for a tryst with Tina, or Frank Langella's superficially urbane but at heart loutish Canadian ambassador.) The only two exceptions are newcomer Paré, mostly called upon to stand and pout; and Thomas Gibson, the latter, straight-man half of Dharma and Greg, who deftly underplays Tina's conniving agent. Didn't Arcand realize that Gibson was getting more laughs than anybody else precisely because he's the closest thing in the picture to a recognizable human being? But even the worst of the name cast is a paragon of subtlety compared to the TV announcers, who mug and preen and call attention to their own stupidity with a noxious arrogance.

So much so that whenever Tina is being interviewed, it becomes an (unfunny) running gag that she's interrupted before getting a word in edgewise. Boorish behavior like this just wouldn't fly on the chat shows Arcand is sending up--coy solicitousness and exaggerated empathy are the names of the game. Which again shows how little the director knows about his supposed target. Both of his targets, actually; for the unforgivable oversight throughout Stardom is that the movie is not only clueless about media circuses, but about beauty itself. Snidely and self-righteously, Arcand constantly denounces Tina's loveliness as a destructive, repellent thing: Her three lovers all end up badly, hauled away in cuffs by uniformed strong-arms after very public crackups; the panelists on a French program make asses of themselves deferring to her comeliness. By the film's end, while Tina's friend and fellow model Toni (Camilla Rutherford) has become a junkie artist molding dresses and TVs from her own shit, Tina herself has somehow wound up pregnant and contented, with a loving doctor husband and a nice home back where she began. Which is really just another way of shutting her up and not worrying about what's going on in that pretty little head of hers.