Portraits of a Naked Lady Dancer

A documentary about strippers that is sometimes sexy but never exploitive, Portraits of a Naked Lady Dancer has the look and feel of a low-budget student film (with inconsistent audio and lots of odd angles). Initially, director Deborah Rowe (who went undercover as a stripper) seems to be making a feminist statement about female power and beauty, but while she has picked an atypical handful of interesting, articulate, relatively well-adjusted strippers with diverse backgrounds who work at a fair-minded upscale club, there's a dark side that steadily emerges: including observations about changed attitudes toward men, being in a dead-end job that can't go on a resume, drug addictions, and loneliness. While it features onstage routines, the film is mostly quite matter-of-fact ("I know some desperate women who are stripping," says one girl, "but I know some desperate women who are housewives."), right up through the finale that goes where no HBO or Showtime exploitation "documentary" would: following these women into the next stage of their lives. The DVD extras are negligible (including a handful of bloopers and an embarrassing interview with the director in which she comes across as inarticulate and dippy). Recommended. Aud: P. (R. Blackwelder)