Covergirl

(Jean-Claude Lord, 1984)
This movie wears its production values on its sleeve, like a soup stain - the runway glamour sequences, the romantic dinner with fireworks, the (inexplicable) big production number at the climax, every last frame of it tinkles off the screen and dies wriggling on the floor. The whole movie exists to serve an impossibly uninvolving romance - the smart and independent up-and-comer falls for the fast-talking impresario in about five boring seconds, all he has to do is splash some money around and she melts. A halfway intelligent script would have at least had her hold off until he stopped being quite such a callow asshole - but as things stand, that blessed moment never arrives. The substance abuse and sexual predation and corporate backstabbing and even the depressive's suicide are entirely of a piece with the jacuzzi-wrestling sequence: not 'realism', much less social commentary, just foxy decadence to shovel the housewives, who to their credit were discriminating enough not to give a damn. Even Stratford icon William Hutt is reduced to a production value; the camera treats him with the same yawning leer that it accords the cardboard box servant-robot, who acts as a visual metaphor for the soul-destroying lifelessness of the production as a whole.