‘Ready’ to Leave

If I had been seated closer to the aisle at an invitational screening of “Ready to Wear (Pret-a-Porter),” I’d have left the theater in the middle of the show. This is a movie that gives every impression of having been thrown together during a 12-minute cab ride.

It is astonishing to me that Robert Altman, for all his talent, could make a movie that is so empty of thought, that reflects pure arrogance in relying for success on a patchwork of totally uninvolving, unconvincing, artificial story lines that, in the end, make no point. Why characters behave as they do is beyond logic or comprehension. Worse, the movie is unfunny, if indeed Altman intended to do a sendup of the fashion business.

It seems axiomatic that you can’t satirize something unless an audience is familiar with the subject satirized. Since few of us know anything about the fashion business, how would we recognize or appreciate seeing a lampoon of the industry?

LOU MORHEIM

Los Angeles