An Eye for Beauty feels like it was written by an alien who learned about human behavior from soap operas.

An insistently distancing if aesthetically pleasing Canadian production.

The message that "An Eye for Beauty" wants to send is that gorgeous people suffer just like the rest of us. But it is so enamored of them that the message gets lost en route to the screen.

Unable to muster much in the way of tension, thanks to that napkin doodle of a plot and a pair of sublimely wooden lead performances, Arcand shoots for the moral complexity of Éric Rohmer and ends up with lesser Gabriele Muccino.