MOVIE REVIEW : ‘STRIPPER’: A REBUFF TO THE PRURIENT

As you watch “Stripper” (citywide), you begin to feel slightly queasy--not because this documentary on a Las Vegas convention of stripteasers leaves you with a sense of sin or scuzziness, but because it doesn’t.

Everything seems average. Everybody who pulls the strings-- club owners, agents, organizers-- works hard to present a veneer of normal, everyday activity. When we see the club owners, they’re natty and blank-faced: perfect executives, 100% business. When the strippers talk, they’re like working girls everywhere: worried about boyfriends, salaries, schooling for their kids.

Not only are these strippers far from social outlaws (each emerges with too human a face for that), they seem amazingly typical: the desperate working mother, the bickering friends on the road (Loree “Mouse” Menton and Lisa “Gio” Suarez). There’s one catch: Most of them--even the ones with spiny-tough fronts--keep revealing unusual vulnerability.

Then they get on stage. Danyel (Kimberly Holcomb), a tawny blond from Vancouver, with Calvin Klein-ad eyes, slithers out in black leather and studs and drags a whip across her back, leaving streaks of red paint (you’re reminded of “Gypsy’s” showstopper, “You Gotta Have a Gimmick”). Janette Boyd, the working mother--she lost everything to a lover who rates the old label, “bounder”--strides around in space-queen robes and an aluminum bra. Sara Costa from working-class Los Angeles, whose mother helps with her wardrobe, peeks out from under her hat like a Cosmo cover girl and Rodeo Collection browser. The onstage personas all radically contradict the offstage ones--they’re elaborate negative fantasies--and, when the women peel to the skin, it seems (perhaps to them as well) only another costume.

The excellent cinematographers, headed by Ed Lachman (who’s worked often for Werner Herzog), give the movie a pristine gleam. It seems appropriate, somehow, that the contest is held in Las Vegas-- which always looks so featureless and bright, as slick and sanitized as a hotel toilet; a city where money gets flushed through, where everything above the sewers is neat and shiny.

Producer-director Jerome Gary has made a tight, engrossing picture. It moves and excites you; though perhaps you can question his “re-dramatizing” approach--or defend it as just another storytelling device. (“Stripper” is not all cinema verite. It was shot in reverse order: The five women were chosen around the time of the convention, then taken back to their home grounds to “re-create” what happened before.)

Gary, who onced lived with an exotic dancer, may be leaning a little too hard on the idea of “normalcy.” It’s the sort of notion you often see in articles on striptease by writers who don’t want you to think they’ve gotten sexually aroused, who want you to understand it’s the phenomenon that concerns them, the underlying truths. (The ads for “Stripper”-- “A close-up look at the most sensual part of a woman . . . her soul”--are near the reductio ad absurdum of this tack.)

You can imagine conversations after the screenings: Men explaining to their dates, “Well, that wasn’t really exploitative. I mean, it showed all those . . . women as really just people. Hey, I could really relate to Danyel. She had problems just like mine.”

In a way, this is an unconscious insult to the strippers themselves, who (here, at least) are all sexy, beautiful, good dancers. Maybe they deserve to be applauded for those qualities, not merely clucked over as symptoms or victims of social malaise (however intensely you disapprove the ramifications of their show).

But the cliches have a certain validity. These women are real as tears and flesh; all of them have somehow been victims; we do see their pain. We see too the repression and rot that drives their business, a touch of its seamy underside. There’s anguish and suspense here, and some humor--the byplay of Mouse and Gio, and the prayerful chants of a San Francisco stripper named “Inspiration Shakti Om.” And, of course, there’s Vegas glitz and some wriggling tease. After all, in social portraiture as well as in stripping, you’ve gotta have a gimmick.

‘STRIPPER’

A 20th Century Fox release of an Arnon Milchan presentation. Director Jerome Gary. Executive producer Milchan. Producers Gary, Geof Bartz, Melvyn J. Estrin. Editors Bartz, Bob Eisenhardt, Lawrence Silk. Camera Ed Lachman. Additional camera Tom Hurtz, Dyanna Taylor, Dave Myers, Haskell Wexler. Music Buffy Sainte-Marie, Jack Nitzsche. With Janette Boyd, Sara Costa, Kimberly Holcomb, Loree Menton, Lisa Suarez.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (under 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).