`Rent' the film gets a new lease on life

Yes, Bohemia is dead. Its funeral rites are pronounced by Larson's best song (La Vie Boheme, quoted earlier), a wondrously nonsensical catalog of tastes, ideas and attitudes ranging from microbrewed beers to Kurosawa movies, with a toast along the way to "Sontag and to Sondheim and to every-thing taboo." But the passage of time, which has left almost nothing taboo, has also inoculated Rent against the disdain of hipsters who might find it woefully unsophisticated. Its idea of Bohemia is not realistic, but romantic, even utopian. Openhearted to a fault, it stakes its integrity on the faith that even in millennial New York, some things -- friendship, compassion, grief, pleasure, beauty -- are more important than money or real estate.