Entertainment

NEAR NUDITY AT ITS WORST

LAST week I thought watch ing women take their clothes off was sexy. This week I saw “A Wink and a Smile.”

The movie is an excruciating documentary about ordinary women taking a burlesque class in Seattle. The eager instructees, taught by a veteran stripper/burlesque artist called Miss Indigo Blue, are middle-class types including fresh-faced students, a doctor and a 51-year-old mom.

Though the women don’t get entirely naked (apparently state law dictates pasties and G-strings must stay on), I was embarrassed for them, then for their families.

Then I was bored as I listened to their Women’s Studies seminar drivel. The performers/victims have an almost religious belief in the strange canard that all bodies are equally attractive (Miss Indigo tells us she knows self-empowered strippers in their 70s and 80s, some of them in wheelchairs, a sight we are spared). Motives include, “I really wanted to express myself in a different way besides painting.”

An inch below the surface is evident pain as the women incessantly mull the “issues” they think they are treating: “I grew up in an environment where women were nothing.” “I’m a virgin.” “I’m hoping to bring back the beauty of the sagging breasts.” “My hope is that I’ll be able to experience something luscious like that because I feel like I haven’t had a lot of that in my life.” It’s souls that are being bared, and they’re sagging woefully.

Running time: 90 minutes. Not rated (profanity, partial nudity). At the Quad, 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.