Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary takes the famous Parisian cabaret club Crazy Horse as it’s subject. So what that means is that this is a movie packed from beginning to end with images of gorgeous female bodies rhythmically moving alongside meticulously constructed light shows. With content like that, it would be pretty hard to make a boring movie, and Crazy Horse certainly isn’t boring; but good lord does it try to be.
The dancers here are nameless, faceless, we never get any sense of who they are, what led to them working here, or how they feel about the job. Heck, they’re all cast to look so similar, we’re never able to tell one from the other at all. We do get to meet the director who is putting together a new series of acts for the show, the overly enthusiastic assistant director who has obsessed about the Crazy Horse his entire life, and the charming little lady who makes all of the dancer’s skimpy outfits—and they seem like they’re all interesting characters to varying degrees—but we never learn enough about them for it to mean anything.
Wiseman, famously, is very passive with his camera, filming his subjects without interacting with them at all, and here that manages to work against the film. Crazy Horse shows us lots of stage performances, but it doesn’t give us enough of a sense of how running things works. It seems intensive and chaotic, but too much so. Without any interview segments where things are explained to us, or title cards that set scenes up, the behind the scenes footage just amounts to people yelling meaningless jargon at one another about processes we don’t understand. If you want to see most of the Crazy Horse’s show without traveling to Paris and buying a ticket, then this one works pretty well on that level, but as an intriguing story about what makes this place so special, it doesn’t quite hit the mark.
