Gloss: The Director's Cut

Billed as somewhere in the ballpark of a Russian Federate Ugly Betty - a Slavic cousin, perhaps, of The Devil Wears Prada - Gloss: The Directors' Cut was supposed to be a concession to the fashion-conscious art cinema type. A chance, it appeared, to multitask: getting in our quota of worthy foreign film while doling out knowing nods and grins at the Karl Lagerfeld-based in-jokes. Unfortunately, like many things in high fashion, Gloss' hype vastly overshoots the commercial product.

Ballsy smalltown wannabe Galya (Vysotskaya) ditches her dead-end job, neandarthal boyfriend, and parents apparently straight from the Russian set of Deliverance in favour of the bright lights and glamour of Moscow city. Despite having an incessantly referenced one leg longer than the other, and chronically over-applied eyeshadow, Galya is determined to make it as a model, and thus marches straight into the editor's office at Beauty magazine, ready to bargain with a basketful of crayfish. After all, as any jobbing model will tell you - if the cheekbones don't convince Anna Wintour, the crustaceans are bound to.

It's at this point that Gloss looks as though it's about to go down the Prada route: with the unsuitable Galya inevitably undergoing an Anne Hathaway makeover, and becoming everything our icy editor didn't know she needed. But something happens on the way to the covershoot, and Gloss takes a series of dizzying narrative turns, none of which it quite follows to fruition. In its 118 minutes, the film breaknecks through the Russian magazine, fashion, and high-class hooker scene, by way of some bizarre bursts of vaguely Tarkovskian surrealism, a brief Bollywood montage, and an eerily familiar 'anti-fashion' catwalk show. Zoolander's Mugatu would surely shudder in his mandarin collar at his 'Derelicte' concept essentially lifted and rebranded as Gloss' 'Fashion is Shit' extravaganza, non?

Although there is something to be recommended in the film's illumination of the excesses and corruption of the Muscovite nouveau riche, and a television special cried out for in said society's commodification of women, its faddy relationship to plotting and characterisation seriously debilitates any larger story it might have had to tell. Awash with vague pastiches of industry stereotypes, Gloss is perhaps only a fashion film in that it slavishly hares after every trendy new storyline that comes its way. Which may indeed be fashion; but it certainly isn't style. [Lindsay West]