Unlike many of my fellow cinephiles, I’m not a chronic re-watcher. One or sometimes two viewings of a film tends to be enough; enough years need to pass for me to forget salient details before I consider a third. But there are exceptions, some more noble than others. Recently, The Zone of Interest needled me into multiple cinema trips, as I unparceled its formal and thematic complexities with differently revelatory results each time. But I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Steve Antin’s less-than-seminal 2010 musical Burlesque, a film with precisely zero complexities to unparcel, that exerts a strangely forceful hold on me just the same.
If it pops up on an in-flight entertainment menu – which it does with surprising frequency – I’m loth to scroll past it. When it was on Netflix, the algorithm pushed it so prominently on my home page that it would have been rude not to take another look now and then. (I can only assume it left the platform out of concern for my mental health.) When a storage-unit fire wiped out my entire DVD collection five years ago, my gifted copy of Antin’s film was the lone survivor, having by chance been packed into a separate, spared box. We are bound by fate, Burlesque and I. Our bond is bigger than we are.
