WHEN GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE MUSCLES

Our perceptions of the shape of documentary film and the shape of women, now and in the future, get stood on their ear in George Butler’s genially partisan “Pumping Iron II: The Women,” now at the Gordon Theatre. The film is built around the competition in Las Vegas in December of 1983 for the World Cup Championship in women’s body building.

Through the glitz at Caesars Palace and the exotic climate of the sport itself, a serious question fights its way to the surface: What’s feminine? When a woman, in this case Australia’s puckish, irresistible superathlete Bev Francis chooses to rival a man in muscle development, does she give up being, heaven help us, “a girl”?

And when a film maker talks with his subjects about “the roles” they’re going to play in a documentary film before it’s made, does it give up being a documentary? Or are both new, exotic hybrids, and only a hint of new forms to come.

Butler (photographer) and Charles Gaines (writer), who did the original books and film, are forever responsible for the unleashing of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who strode out of “Pumping Iron” and straight into the hearts of Middle America. Now, in “Pumping Iron II: The Women,” these two (with Butler credited for “conceiving, producing and directing”) have fashioned a nonfiction movie where the white hats and black hats are as clear as in a Western, or at a televised wrestling match.

Clearly the darling of Butler’s heart--and film--is Bev Francis, an Australian athlete who, as we watch, retrains herself for her first body-building competition. We see her first in Melbourne, strapping on the massive leather supporting belt, powdering her hands and hefting 510 pounds to win the Victorian power-lifting championships.

For all her awesomeness in a training gym, you have the feeling that around her friends, Francis is a “great mate,” completely unassuming, fun to be around. In a bizarre way, she’s the overdeveloped underdog of the piece--the challenge she faces isn’t anything she can overcome physically. Rather it’s the hallowed notion of what the muscled woman’s body should be, an ideal she may or may not be able to change.

Butler chooses three other possible finalists to profile: a controversial contender (sultry title-holder Rachel McLish, the self-styled Cher of body-building; an acolyte of McLish’s (Lori Bowen, to whom the winning prize money would mean that her body-builder fiance could give up strip-dancing at a Chippendale’s-like club), and a sleekly muscled, articulate moderate (Carla Dunlop, who travels to Las Vegas accompanied by her mother and sister), probably the easiest of the group for the general film audience to identify with. Butler’s cinematographer, Dyanna Taylor, accumulated some 90 hours of footage showing these four healthy extroverts as they train, tan and talk. (There is even what Butler says was a spontaneous marriage proposal while the camera ground on, an unsurprising and faintly depressing sign of our times.)

In the final edit, Butler builds his suspense for all its worth, aided by this hand-picked cast whose actions exceeds any documentarian’s dream. Even the judges--attempting with lunatic ineptitude to get some agreement on the scoring--seem to have wandered off some Preston Sturges set. Rachel McLish, trying to get a sequined suit past the rules committee when only plain-fabric ones are allowed, outdoes herself as the girl you love to hate. (Butler has said that, after months of arguing with McLish’s manager over the role she would play in this saga, it finally became “Rachel plays herself.”)

Through casting and the staging of encounters--such as the one in which Bev and Carla discuss femininity over a deep rub-down--”Pumping Iron II” moves a step closer to a dramatic film than the strict documentary of the past. (Butler speaks in the press notes that “The question was always how to get the characters to develop,” a plaint that might have come from any writer of fiction.) Certain moments of the Bell/Mark/McCall “Streetwise” do the same thing (the father/son jail conversation, and a subsequent, wrenching funeral sequence). Perhaps the form itself is undergoing an upheaval.

The film’s two most important points lurk under all its disingenuous “overheards”: Who is “feminine,” and how quickly is that definition changing? Faster than this competition judging would suggest, I suspect. Look at body-building itself and how our perception of that has changed. “Pumping Iron” was only eight years ago, when both Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno seemed exotic and bizarre in the extreme. Today Schwarzenegger reigns in “Terminator”; we are surfeited with news of the reshaping of John Travolta’s body to bring him closer to muscular perfection, and on every corner there are the beefcake ads for “Rambo.”

The image of strong, beautifully muscled women is next: Sandahl Bergman in “Conan,” then Grace Jones, whose strength is as much the point as her beauty in “A View to a Kill” (let alone “Conan the Destroyer”). And in magazines, it’s not enough for fashion models to be thin and languorous, today they’ve got to be thin and fit. In another eight years, the astonishment of Bev Francis’ sculptured body may be far less strange to our eyes.

Butler puts us where he is, unabashedly in Bev Francis’ corner, by letting us see the woman as she really is, and she provides his film’s most touching surprise. When she comes down from her back-lit, goddess-like Olympian posing at the competition and says, only faintly sardonically: “Did I look like a ‘girl’? You’re not allowed to have muscles if you’re a girl,” and lays her head in fiance/body builder Steve Weinberger’s lap, the crux of the whole silly business of “femininity” is laid bare--in one unexpected, tender instant.