Superstar

Superstar (2012) is a French satirical comedy by Xavier Giannoli you can watch online on iFILM. Martin Kazinski recycles computers for a living. One morning he's nobody. By noon, strangers are filming him in the street and he has no idea why.

The mystery of how the fame started is never resolved — that's deliberate. Giannoli is interested in what the phenomenon does to a person once it has him. Kad Merad plays the bewildered everyman at the center of it all with a kind of baffled dignity that keeps the film from becoming a cartoon; Cécile de France plays the woman who enters his new, absurd life. The media machinery that produces and then consumes Martin is shown without sympathy but also without easy moralizing.

Made a decade before the algorithm became a household word, Superstar predicted something real about virality, the appetite for random celebrities, and the quiet damage that celebrity inflicts. Stream Superstar (2012) online on iFILM.