Live Nude Girls Unite!

Live Nude Girls Unite!

2000, USA, 70 min.

Written and Directed Julia Query and Vicky Funari

2000, USA, 70 min.

Since Roger and Me, the first person documentary has become far too successful to ignore.  At its best, this sub-genre enables the filmmaker to explore issues with a refreshing and authentic voice while engaging an audience on a personal level with the issues he or she is exploring.  A much more common outcome however, is the abandonment of critical inquiry and nuance in favour of contrived dramatic situations played out for emotional impact.  All of this mugging for the camera can also easily lapse into self righteous narcissism (which admittedly, is not entirely absent from actual journalism), and results in polemicist works based more on personality than ideas.  The predominance of this subgenre within documentary film has proven to be as frustrating for doc enthusiasts as it has been wildly popular with mass audiences.

Shot on the cusp of the digital video revolution, Live Nude Girls Unite! is a personal DIY project that is actually saved from stridency or frivolity by the presence of its main protagonist: Julia Query.  An academic, turned stand-up comic, turned stripper, Julia is the leader of an historic union drive to organize her sisters at San Francisco’s Lusty Lady Club to form the first ever Exotic Dancers Union.  Julia’s larger-than-life personality is engaging, funny, and entirely fearless in the face of rude patrons and management alike.  Her entourage at the club is made up similarly like-minded, sexually liberated and hyper-educated feminists (she mentions that one of the perks of the job is that she is surrounded by so many Master’s Graduates) who strip for a living, and are campaigning for better working conditions and a little respect for what they do.  This lack of respect becomes more pronounced as the case gets national attention, with predictable cheap shots that stripping is not a “real job” coming fast and furious from late-night television hacks and the population at large.  This attitude is understood by anyone who works in the service industry (which includes strippers) who is bone-weary of hearing that how they make a living is “fun” and not really as important as the work done by currency speculators, Ponzi scheme fraudsters, or late night television writers.

Running parallel to the union drive story is a sub-plot that propels the film beyond the novelty of its premise, as Julia decides whether or not to reveal her occupation to her mother (“Thanks for the Ballet lessons Mom”).   This could have just been a clumsy narrative device used to create some dramatic tension, but it is justified in the context of the film since Julia’s mother is an activist doctor who has crusaded for the health rights of prostitutes for two decades, and it so happens that they were both to appear at a conference for sex trade workers.  Her daughter’s revelation near the end of the film forces her to come to terms not just with Julia’s unconventional lifestyle but with her own preconceptions about sexual liberation gained over a lifetime as a second-wave feminist and medical pioneer. To put it mildly, stripping is not what she wanted for her daughter, but her daughter’s freedom to choose has been what her life’s work was all about.

Though a bit rough around the edges, the film is a fascinating and engaging window on a world that is hidden in plain, neon-lit sight, presented through the formidable eyes of one exceptional individual.  This only proves that you don’t have to eat 300 cheeseburgers in a row or harass war widows to make a personal documentary that is genuine, informative and compelling.

Derek Gladu

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