The old bump and grind receives a squeaky-clean workout in “Burlesque,” a backstage tease-o-rama about life in and out of corsets and garters. Sparkly and smiley and thoroughly goofy (sleepy and dopey make appearances too), the story turns on an Iowan refugee for whom the Big Time means doing the hoochie-coochie in a Los Angeles club. There, where the dancers are dollies with Pilates physiques, the mistress of ceremonies should be Alan Cumming (who shows up now and again, giggling on the sidelines), but turns out to be Cher, trying her darnedest to play older and wiser but without, you know, the wrinkles and gray. Cher plays Tess, the proprietress of one of those atmospheric holes in the wall where dreams turn into realities — or at least a savvy combination of a Disney tween program and a Lifetime weepie. It’s a perfect platter for the plucky Iowan dish, Ali, played by the pop singer Christina Aguilera, who enters in white hooker heels and a bright Beverly Hills smile. By all rights it should also be a nice fit for Ms. Aguilera, a graduate of “The Mickey Mouse Club” (where she appeared with Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears) and the seasoned music-video star of spectacles like “Dirrty,” in which she trampled on poor Walt’s grave (and her own bubble-gum persona) by feverishly pumping her hips in peek-a-boo chaps.
Alas, both her moves and her feature-film debut are perversely tame (no spanky-panky here, unlike in “Dirrty”), closer to your grandmother’s fan dance than to the neo-burlesque revues that began popping up in the early 1990s. As performed by troupes like the Velvet Hammer, the new burlesque put a feminist spin on the art of the tease with women who, with their tattoos and Bettie Page dos, bore little resemblance to the androgynous hard-bodies of mainstream music videos. In the new burlesque, women not only control their images (that’s the idea, anyway), but they also redefine what alluring looks like with sometimes proudly fleshy bodies. At its most radical, it is drag for women, a place where femininity is performed, not assumed.
“Burlesque” nods, though more rightly wags its derrière, in the direction of new burlesque, but it’s strictly old school — at times, really old school — with a story line that had already gathered dust by the time the choreographer Busby Berkeley pointed his camera up the collective skirt of the chorus in the 1933 musical “42nd Street.”
As in that old-studio gem, the story in “Burlesque” unwinds both onstage and off, a twinned perspective that in most backstage musicals helps define the line between ostensible real life and performance. No such line exists in this movie, either because the writer and director, Steven Antin, hasn’t a clue what real life looks like, or he actually does and has opted to sweeten these worlds with the same softly diffused, caramelized light.
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