So man, this is a frustrating movie. Because in its core, there’s something interesting, a portrait of the demimonde in Weimar Germany, a look at how a kind of new permissiveness in social roles stood in tension to a traditional German nationalism, and how the latter was going to roll over this interwar era. (Plus, of course, it’s delivering queer representation in an era where that was more unusual than it is now, which is cool.)

But… this movie wants to tell that story by interspersing it like 50/50 with on-the-nose semi-diegetic musical numbers that explain to us what the underlying subtext was of the scene we just watched. So you get a scene where our (poor) protagonists are at a baron’s party and kinda visibly out of their social element, followed by a song that talks about “money, money, money” just in case it wasn’t clear to you.

The constant interruption of an interesting movie for intolerable musical numbers reminds me, actually, of Altman’s Nashville. There as here, if they’d just excised all the song and dance routines, the movie would be about 2-3x as good.

Even then, though, I have a deep allergy to the kind of character that Minnelli is playing — the flamboyant, always-performing, always-on sort — so this movie was never going to really work for me. So I guess chalk this one up as good for what it is, but extremely not my thing.