BENEATH A STARLET SKY

Fashionista Lola Santisi is hit with multiple personal and professional crises during a trip to the annual Cannes Film Festival.

Giving up her Los Angeles roots has proved difficult for Lola, the Hollywood princess first introduced in Celebutantes (2009). Now happily residing in New York, she gets to live and work with Julian, her Best Gay Forever (BGF,) as the busy CEO of Julian Tennant Inc., an up-and-coming fashion line. However, Lola’s doctor fiancée, Luke “Lev” Levin, is still back in L.A., making a bicoastal existence a necessity. And Lola’s famous family needs her attention as well. Her gruff director father Paulie is still making award-winning films, while her former-model mom has found a new calling as a cast member of a “Housewives” style reality show. Her aspiring director brother Christopher is in love with her best friend, Kate, an ambitious CAA agent, who has just dumped him so she could concentrate on her career. And as talented as he is, getting Julian’s name out there has proven challenging, making his deep-pocketed backers a bit skittish. But then Lola scores the major coup of having Julian’s dresses appear in Baz Luhrmann’s latest extravaganza, Four Weddings and a Bris. So they head to the French Riviera for the film’s Cannes premier, and a Julian Tennant runway show. The trip coincides with a high-profile magazine cover shoot with the film’s leading lady Saffron Sykes and her handsome boyfriend Markus Livingston. But the cover shoot looks increasingly dicey after Saffron and her starlet co-star (and Kate’s client) Cricket Curtis get caught in a Sapphic clinch. Then Lev shows up in France and admits, to Lola’s horror, that he wants to quit medicine to pursue acting. Throw in a supermodel with anger-management issues; an alcoholic movie star who insists on staying in character as a cross-dressing Columbian drug lord; and an icy magazine editor bent on destruction, and it is a miracle if Lola can walk away with her life, let alone her job. The increasingly absurd plot zips along, but the constant name- and brand-dropping often comes across as more obnoxious than amusing.

Forgettable showbiz spoof.