I would’ve watched my first Frederick Wiseman movie a lot sooner if someone told me he made a fly-on-the-wall nudie cutie.  By all accounts, Wiseman’s documentaries are the height of observational, humanist filmmaking, but I can never quite motivate myself to actually watch one.  A three-and-a-half-hour documentary about the current state of the New York Public Library system?  A four-hour doc about the daily operations of a Michelin Star restaurant?  A four-and-a-half-hour doc about the inner-workings of Boston’s municipal government?  I often hear that these are some of the very best documentaries ever made, but they always sound more like doing homework or serving jury duty than watching a movie.  There’s no valor in being incurious, though, so I did eventually find a Wiseman picture that met me halfway (by cutting his late-period runtimes in half) and spoke to one of my personal cinematic interests (sex).  The 2011 doc Crazy Horse finds Wiseman hanging out in the titular Parisian strip club, documenting the backstage & onstage mechanics of its decades-running cabaret act.  It’s a series of cutesy, old-fashioned stripteases occasionally interrupted by nitpicking arguments between dancers, choreographers, and producers about how the staging of the show should evolve.  It delivers all of the usual step-by-step procedural storytelling of the fly-on-the-wall documentary approach Wiseman helped pioneer, except mildly spiced up with a little early Russ Meyer nudie picture kitsch.  I can’t speak for everyone, but I would personally much rather hang around behind the stage of a Parisian burlesque than behind a desk at Boston City Hall, which made Crazy Horse the ideal entry point into Wiseman’s catalog.

I obviously can’t compare the stylistic approach of Crazy Horse to Wiseman’s more iconic works, but I will say it’s a lot less … dry than I expected.  Sure, he locks the camera onto a single, fixed horizontal plane for long, lingering shots, but in this case it’s to capture the fluid movements of a nude body under psychedelic gel lights.  There are also wordless montages of those gel lights switching on or off or switching colors, like the marquees lighting up at dusk sequence of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.  Wiseman might be a notoriously patient, restrained filmmaker, but even he can’t resist framing the stage performances of Crazy Horse with a touch of the razzle-dazzle pizazz with which Bob Fosse framed Cabaret; no one could.  Self-promoted as “the best chic nude show in town,” the Crazy Horse stage show provides plenty of psychedelic-kitsch eye candy to fill a feature-length documentary.  Wiseman being who he is, though, he also drags his cameras to the mundane meeting rooms, merch stands, and projection booths that make the magic happen – documenting long, circular debates about the future of the show.  You get the sense watching the performances that not much has changed about the Crazy Horse cabaret act since it was first staged in the 1950s (besides maybe some technological stagecraft, some musical novelties, and the occasional celebrity appearance from someone like Dita Von Teese, who appears on background posters through the film), and yet the choreographer endlessly argues with other staff about the evolving creative vision of the show.  It’s an empire built on cheap thrills, cheap champagne, and even cheaper pop music, but it’s treated like the staging of a high-art opera.  The great joy of Wiseman’s film is in how he’s willing to underline the irony of those passionate discussions, while also fully indulging in the visual beauty of what those artists are fighting for.

A lot of the backstage bickering about the creative direction of Le Crazy Horse Saloon is a classic art vs. commerce debate.  On one side, there’s the poetic visionary who draws inspiration for his choreography from his dreams; on the other, there are off-screen investors insisting on the most consistent, lucrative show possible to keep the money flowing.  The commerce side of that debate can be outright grotesque, particularly in a sequence where hopeful dancers are auditioned for the aesthetics of their bodies instead of their talents as performers.  The art speaks for itself, though, and as corny as some of the sub-Busby Berkeley stripteases can feel conceptually, there’s a genuine elegance to their artistry that goes far beyond mere sexual titillation.  I wonder how often Wiseman’s had to sit through similar debates about the commercial viability of his own work throughout the decades.  He’s a well-venerated auteur at this point, but even the most adventurous moviegoing audiences can be intimidated by the seemingly mundane stories he chooses to tell.  I hear that his new film Menus-Plaisirs is one of the best documentaries of the year, but I’ve spent far too much of my life working in commercial kitchens to want to return there for another four sweaty hours.  Even the two-hour stretch of Crazy Horse wore on me a little once I got the full scope of the movie’s subject, and this one features glittery titties & swinging tassels instead of lengthy meetings with a local city council.  I enjoyed my time with Wiseman and the girls, but I’ll also confess that it still felt like clocking in for a shift at work.  I felt like I was a Crazy Horse busboy for a night, a gig that only a teenage Parisians could fully love.

-Brandon Ledet