‘The Unveiling’: Sure-Fire Subject Has Its Charms

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen presents at 7:30 tonight Rodney Evans’ “The Unveiling,” an entertaining documentary on three exotic dancers: Michele Watley, Eldad Sahar and Dixie Evans. Sahar and Watley are expert dancers with perfect bodies who are consummately skilled at knowing how to tease their audiences, who tend to be gays and lesbians, respectively. Both Sahar and Watley consider themselves bisexual, and they are both clearly intelligent, thoroughly disciplined and detached professionals. Whether they’ve thought about it or not, they are in their way upholders of a traditional American puritanism: the couple of millimeters of fabric that separate them from total nudity is a matter of major importance and self-esteem to both of them.

Dixie Evans is of an entirely different era. Known as the “Marilyn Monroe of Burlesque,” Evans is a hearty, sharp-witted, reflective 70-something survivor of the golden age of stripteasing in theaters and nightclubs that pretty much died out by the ‘60s. (The physical contact Sahar and Watley make with their audiences would be unthinkable in the respectable venues of Evans’ era.)

Evans today runs the Exotic World Museum in Helendale, Calif., where she holds striptease contests and still loves to dance. Evans, who looks her age, has an endearing exuberance and lack of vanity. Eerily, she suggests what Marilyn Monroe might look like today if she were still alive, leaving you to wonder if Monroe could have ever accepted to the ravages of time as good-naturedly as Evans.

Watley is also loaded with personality, and you hope that she fulfills her dream of moving into mainstream entertainment as a singer or an actress. By contrast, Sahar is distant, clearly more comfortable revealing his body than himself.

As a documentary, “The Unveiling” tends to be rambling and repetitive, but you probably won’t mind because Evans has come up with such a sure-fire subject and asked good questions. And yes, his film certainly is erotic.

The Cinematheque also has joined with Out on the Screen and 4 Front Magazine to sponsor “Queer Shorts,” two programs of gay and lesbian films screening Saturday at Raleigh, the first at 7 p.m. (which is sold out; the program will be repeated at 11:30 p.m.) and the second at 9:30 p.m. A preview of a selection of the offerings in both programs is most impressive. The range of styles is suggested by two films within the 7 p.m. program: Bill Oliver’s 26-minute “The Debutantes” and the 15-minute New Zealand film “Twilight of the Gods.”

“The Debutantes” is a traditional narrative in which a young man, well played by James Waterston, struggles to come out to his wealthy Southern family, his formidable father in particular. Some of the supporting performances are overly theatrical, but “The Debutantes” is an affecting film.

New Zealander Stewart Main’s “Twilight of the Gods” is a work of delirious period camp pathos from the maker of the hilarious feature “Desperate Remedies,” in which a handsome British soldier and an equally handsome Maori warrior decide to make love instead of war, which becomes an excuse for considerable nudity.

The second program includes Kim Longiotto and Jano Williams’ incisive, fascinating, 53-minute “Shinjuku Boys,” centering on three Japanese “annabes,” young Japanese women who live as men. They work as hosts at the New Marilyn Club in Tokyo’s bustling Shinjuku district, an establishment that attracts mainly straight women for the same reasons that famous Takarazuka stage revues do: women, in impersonating men, can suggest the romantic qualities Japanese women often find lacking in Japanese men.

Tatsu, who has taken hormones to seem more masculine, lives with a devoted, fully accepting girlfriend, while Gaish, who does not believe in taking hormones, has a forceful personality but eventually reveals why she fears commitment. Kazuki, in turn, has given up women, at least for now, to be in a tender, though sexless, relationship with Kumi, a male-to-female transsexual entertainer at the New Marilyn.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.

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The Grande 4-Plex concludes its largely mediocre “Cine Latino” series with a one-week run of Luis Cesar D’Angiolillo’s “Killing Grandpa,” which opens Friday. The formidable Federico Luppi stars as a famed but thwarted Argentine engineer, confined to his bed until an enigmatic young woman (Ines Estevez) puts him back on his feet. The stars are done in by leaden pacing and a rip-off ending.

Information: (213) 617-0268.