Ready to Wear.

* And speaking of big ones, there is Robert Altman's Ready to Wear (formerly Pret-a-porter), a picture that only the director's mother could love. Correction: though almost all reviewers, even those who habitually slobber over Altman, considered it one of his rare failures ("rare"?--well, perhaps in the sense of "outstanding," as in "O rare Ben Jonson!"), a few diehards could be found who actually endorsed this ordure. It is the kind of movie made by a subliterate megalomaniac who has been sufficiently adulated by critics from Pauline Kael on down to believe that whatever he does is ipso facto magisterial. Failures could always be ascribed to his being ahead of his time.

In Ready to Wear, Mr. Altman and his co-scenarist, a certain Barbara Shulgasser--about whom the press kit keeps strangely mum--apparently intended a satirical expose of the couture (sorry, we have to translate into English, so fashion) business, in much the same way as The Player, one of Altman's most undeserved hits, was supposedly lampooning Hollywood. But it should be clear to a 10-year-old that, if you are going to send up Hollywood, you do not enlist some of its biggest names to play bit parts in your movie, just as if you are going to mock the fashion industry, you do not litter the screen with some of the famous Paris and Milan designers, not to mention some of Tinseltown's best-dressed stars. The formula for such moviemaking is: Get yourself some thirty big names from film and fashion, include the latest designs from the willing fashion houses (the really big ones declined), and then pretend to laugh at them (Pretend-a-porter?) in such a way that it draws no blood. Blood stains would be hard to remove from all that costly high fashion.

For high fashion it is, despite the deceptive title, Pret-a-porter, further diluted into Ready to Wear. People might be less eager to see Sophia Loren, Lauren Bacall, and Kim Basinger in mere ready-to-wear, but Couture doesn't have as good a ring to it as Pret-a-porter, still less so if it had been translated into Fashion, a title that would suggest something you could pick up from the neighborhood tailor.

Ready to Wear lasts well over two hours, even though it wears out its welcome after ten minutes. In typically grandiose Altman fashion, it tries to tell half a dozen stories simultaneously, and does justice to none. As typically, it began as a much longer movie that was then frantically whittled down, leaving its truncated plot elements uneasily jostling, when not downright fighting, one another.

Even worse than the movie's disjointedness is its tastelessness. Thus several characters step into dog excrement (a gag to gag on); thus the aging stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren, are assigned a bedroom scene in which, after Mastroianni has let out several wolf howls at the partially disrobed Miss Loren, he falls asleep as she tries to crawl into bed with him--a scene that could give coitus interruptus a bad name; and thus, in the end, high-fashion models parade down the runway starkers, suggesting that haute couture is really the Emperor's New Clothes. To make the point still more obvious, Altman cuts to tiny tots gamboling sans clothes, a typical example of his muddleheadedness. For if high fashion is no different from female nudity, and that in turn no different from infant nakedness, the whole thing is really innocent, which is hardly what a satire should be telling us.

And the last straw is the pusillanimity with which the title was translated at the eleventh hour, because puzzled people were pronouncing porter as if it were a dark beer, so that it now appears both in English and in French, a two-headed monster like its producing company, Miramax, headed by Bob and Harvey Weinstein. To carry two-headedness even further, the cinematography is by two cut-rate cameramen, Pierre Mignot and Jean Lepine, who make shots that should be sharp and stylish look as fuzzy as the thinking behind this hapless venture.