The Last Showgirl
Before The Last Showgirl, most of us might have seen Pamela Anderson as an actress forever fixed in time as a blonde, busty sex symbol of the 1990s. She came to fame cavorting in a skimpy swimsuit in Baywatch, she posed for Playboy, made bad marriages, got caught up in one of the first “sex tape” scandals – that is, before aspiring stars began leaking them on purpose. To imagine she would suddenly reinvent herself as a ‘serious’ dramatic proposition was like imagining Jayne Mansfield might return from the dead for a season at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In the United States today, one should not be surprised at anything. Anderson’s comeback has been rather more benign than the return of Donald Trump. She has published a successful memoir, appeared on Broadway, embraced good causes. Finally, at the age of 57, she has appeared in a movie that is not trash.
The Last Showgirl is the third film directed by Gia Coppola, the youngest of that distinguished clan to make her mark as a Hollywood director. So far, it’s been hardly more than a faint scratch. While her grandfather, Francis Ford Coppola, has grown ever more megalomaniacal, Gia has kept things low-key. Her debut feature, Palo Alto (2013) was unassuming and well-received, her second film, Mainstream (2020), vanished without a trace.
The Last Showgirl is easily her most ambitious project, and it owes everything to Pamela Anderson, who is brittle but moving in the lead role of Shelly, and to the scene-stealing Jamie Lee Curtis as her friend, Annette. The story itself is slight, and told in a confusing manner, as if we were eavesdropping on Shelly’s life trying to figure out her relationships with the rest of the cast. We get there eventually, but even presuming that scriptwriter, Kate Gersten, was deliberately seeking this reality TV fuzziness, it feels disjointed.
For a movie set in the world of Las Vegas showgirls who dance in a burlesque review called Le Razzle Dazzle, it’s some sort of achievement to never lift the mood out of pathos. We begin with a scene of Shelly on stage, wearing a bejewelled policeman’s cap, auditioning for a part in a revue. She says she’s 36, but the lines in her face tell a different story. It’s already a sad scenario.
We soon realise this is a flash-forward to a scene that occurs later in the film. We also recognise this will be a story that focuses on the characters – their insecurites, their psychological states – rather than narrative. Suddenly we’re at the true beginning of our tale, in a shabby, crowded dressing room at a Las Vegas cabaret, watching the dancers adjust their costumes and put on their make-up. Shelly is the oldest of the group, a maternal figure for two younger girls, Jodie and Mary-Anne (Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song). Having been around since the 1980s, she’s viewed as the star of the show, although she seems to have gradually migrated to the back row.
Throughout the film, Coppola barely shows us what is happening on stage. All the action takes place in the dressing room, the crowded corridors, at Shelly’s place, or maybe on the rooftop of the club, where the characters spend long minutes gazing at the Vegas skyline, which is no thing of beauty. Not to us, at least, but Shelly has spent so many years in this town it has become her Mecca. She views herself as an artist, and the cabaret as part of a grand artistic tradition, with its roots in Paris.
It's a delusion, a form of psychic self-defence that doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. Coppola emphasises the rundown feel of the show, and of Shelly’s life, by shooting the film on 16 mm celluloid, which makes it feel as if this footage had been retrieved from some forgotten vault in a Hollywood back lot.
The crisis arrives when the stage manager, Eddie (an understated performance by Dave Bautista), tells the girls the bosses have decided the show will be closing in two weeks. It’s a problem for the younger girls, who are fleeing oppressive families and trying to scrape together a living, but a catastrophe for Shelly, whose entire sense of self is invested in the cabaret.
That’s basically the story. As the clock ticks, we fill in the details of Shelly’s portrait. We learn that she and Eddie were once an item, and that she has an illegitimate daughter named Hannah, (Billie Lourd), who has been brought up by foster parents. At this stage of her life, Shelly is desperate to reconnect with her daughter, who seems to regard her mother with a mixture of scorn, resentment, love and pity. The thought Hannah can’t shake off, is that she was abandoned so Shelly could pursue her destiny in a tawdry “nudie” show.
Shelly’s best friend, Annette, is a former dancer who now works as a cocktail waitress in a casino, when she’s not drinking or gambling. Loud, raw-boned, covered in bronzer, lurid eye shadow and silvery lipstick, this is a staggering turn from Jamie Lee Curtis. When she gets up on a table during a shift at the casino and gyrates to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, it's probably the highlight of the film, at once hypnotic and grotesque.
Nothing that Shelly does is quite so effective at summing up the false glamour and futility of the showgirl lifestyle. We chart her despair by degrees, as she is forced to admit Le Razzle Dazzle has had its day. Even worse is the realisation that she is simply too old to display her charms to paying customers every night. The camera drives home the point by dwelling on Shelly’s wrinkled visage. She is a ruin of her former pinup looks, having sacrificed her best years to a fantasy that bears as much resemblance to reality as the Sphinx outside a Vegas casino does to the one in Giza.
All of this makes for a touching, if predictable, study of the effects of aging, in which we find it hard to draw a line between Pamela Anderson and Shelly. One has to admire Anderson’s courage in being able to swallow her vanity and take on such a role, but our admiration doesn’t make the film any less depressing. Only the most callow youth could watch The Last Showgirl and not feel a shiver of melancholy at the idea of encroaching old age. Fortunately for most of us, we don’t have to strap on a rhinestone-studded g-string, adopt a dazzling smile, and contemplate our mortality on stage.
The Last Showgirl
Directed by Gia Coppola
Written by Kate Gersten
Starring: Pamela Anderson, Billie Lourd, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Jason Schwartzman
USA, M, 88 mins