Living la Vie en Rouge.(Parisian red-light district)(Brief Article)

By 10 o' clock most nights, the boulevard de Clichy, at the foot of Montmartre, is choked with tour buses heading for the Moulin Rouge. They come from as far away as Poland and Scandinavia, honking and edging their way through traffic before disgorging their wide-eyed passengers into the bright lights and blur of the evening. This is Pigalle, Paris's red-light district, which has fueled the imagination of artists and poets--and emptied the wallets of soldiers and sailors-- for more than 200 years. Visitors to Paris tend to as-sociate the city' s fame with the Eiffel Tower. But its sexier, slinkier infamy lies in the streets and alleyways that make up Pigalle, where sex shops are aglow with more neon than a Las Vegas truck stop.

If only it would stay that way. Pigalle will burst back onto the international scene this week with the release of Nicole Kidman's much- ballyhooed film "Moulin Rouge." But today's Pigalle is as different from the almost naive naughtiness of the movie's 19th-century flesh- for-fantasy emporium as Mae West is from Pamela Anderson. Old Pigalle is being replaced by a commercialized mall of McPorn and "family entertainment." Touched as much as any other part of France by globalization, the neighborhood is suffering an existential identity crisis, unsure whether it wants to be a well-scrubbed shell of its former self, a bigger profit center for the skin trade--or a tourist trap. "In the past it was prostitution and pimps," grouses the bartender at the seedy bar Aux Noctambules, "Today it' s a ripoff."

The Moulin Rouge stands at the center of this clash of cultures. The old red lady is doing better than ever these days: by a quarter to 11, the line to get in stretches down the block, and when the doors open doormen fight to keep hangers-on at bay. Revenue jumped 30 percent last year to $30 million--partly because the theater is courting a cleaner image, billing its new production, "Feerie" ("Enchantment"), as a "family show." Nudity is so commonplace in France, from beaches to shampoo ads in the Metro, that bare breasts are not considered shocking, says director Pierre-Antoine Gailly. "You don' t go to the Moulin Rouge to see sex," says Gailly, divorcing the theater from the sex shops that surround it. "I don't even cross the street," says spokeswoman Fanny Rabass with a sniff, referring to the seedier side of the Boulevard de Clichy.

That kind of ...