Burlesque

Burlesque Directed by Steve Antin Runtime: 100 min.

Hollywood can’t figure out what to do with the mighty Beyonce, our era’s most powerfully pleasing and joyful musical performer, but the thoroughly mannered Christina Aguilera fits right in with the industry’s phoniness. Aguilera’s starring-role movie debut in Burlesque is as inauthentic as her performing style. From the moment she opens her mouth and cranks out a guttural rendition of Etta James’ “Something’s Got a Hold of Me,” the movie leaves credibility behind. Showcasing Aguilera’s attempt to sound like a 50-year-old black woman in the guise of white appropriation, Burlesque sells a myth about show business that is both unwelcome and shopworn.

Aguilera plays Ali--short for Alice--an Iowa waitress who comes to Los Angeles the way Janet Gaynor did in the first A Star is Born, naively pounding the pavement until she stumbles upon a nightclub called “Burlesque” where elaborate stage shows feature dancers lipsyncing to prerecorded music. In a serious movie this might be a metaphor for modest dreams moldering on the fringes of the corporatized, superstar system where imitation and posturing have taken the place of genuine personal expression--American Idol land. But instead, writer-director Steven Antin (a former child performer) uses the out-of-time lounge as a storytelling shortcut: the musical numbers don’t express anything; they take the place of a nonexistent narrative.

Together, Antin and Aguilera concoct a bizarre-world culled from Flashdance and Chicago--the two films that pinpoint the nadir of the movie musical genre through where performers faked singing and dancing (using distracting, hyperactive editing and a gymnastic version of Auto-Tune [cq]) while falsifying the way the romance, ambition and the world actually work. Ali’s vulgar drive speaks to something in Tess, the matronly and vampiric proprietress of Burlesque lounge. In this role, Cher is as phony as Aguilera, her pale, masklike face remains immobile yet she coasts on personality, that force-of-nature campiness that defines drag queen hauteur.

Burlesque’s notion of showbiz exploitation/celebration is so distanced from the realities of artistry and professionalism that it immediately sends confused sexual signals. The house band, bar staff and chorus line (epitomized by Cam Gigandet as a young bartender-songwriter whose splendid torso flouts the film’s sexual coyness) are blatantly seductive yet androgynous. Ticket-seller Allen Cumming flashes his decadent grin from Broadway’s revival of Cabaret, leading to endless antiseptic echoes of Bob Fosse’s lewd choreography. These post-Bill Clinton gyrations normalize public pandering; they proffer sex that is not sex. One tragedy of contemporary showbiz is the repetition of Fosse’s idiosyncratic style as the prevailing choreographic standard (as if Beyonce or Michael Jackson never existed). Antin seems not to know what burlesque actually was; he gloms on to the popularity of the abominable hits Chicago and Moulin Rouge and this insincere imitation of pop history becomes the basis for perpetuating fakery.

It’s hilarious when Ali reads several books on the history of burlesque--as if studying-up--then continues American Idol-style derivations to prove her talent. Aguilera’s baby-face sometimes recalls the doughy look of the supremely self-infatuated Mae West yet, lacking West’s brilliance, remains humorless. She’s not an original, just a perpetual student desperate to impress--an effort recently outstripped by Lady Gaga whose new millennium erotophobia has already made Aguilera’s sexual taunts (as in the music video Dirty) somehow seem imitative. Unoriginal Aguilera takes the fun and sex out of Burlesque’s conceit which already misrepresents fun, sex and theater. Aguilera’s performance can be summed up by her single-minded rule: Why sing when you can oversing?

Too bad Antin hasn’t studied and emulated Vincente Minnelli, Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen and George Sidney--great directors who believed in organic and authentic performance and knew to highlight musical talent as a seamless, human experience. If Antin had ambition he might have hewed closer to Paul Verhoeven’s remarkable and misunderstood Showgirls to chart the decline of showbiz that Aguilera epitomizes, including the film’s whore-chic motifs (an unexamined cultural mode only slightly justified by some great lingerie costumes). Instead, Antin’s models seem to be the uninspired decomposers Adrian Lyne, Baz Luhrmann and especially Rob Marshall, the displaced TV-hack whose Fosse rip-offs and over-edited musical numbers ensure that Burlesque’s joins an inauthentic tradition.