The Last Showgirl stars Pamela Anderson as a Las Vegas dancer who has reached the end of her career (too old). And she is wonderful, a revelation. I’d like to say I saw it coming but I did not. Did you? When she was doing all that bouncing in slo-mo along the beach in Baywatch did you ever think: Pammy’s going to make a fine dramatic actress one day? But she’s better than the film itself. It would be flimsy without her – plus her own backstory adds a whole other layer. ‘What you sold was young and sexy,’ her character is told at one point, ‘you aren’t either any more.’
The film is directed by Gia Coppola (Francis Ford’s granddaughter) and written by Kate Gersten (married to Gia’s first cousin) and produced by Robert Schwartzman (a cousin once removed) and there’s a cameo for Jason Schwartzman (another cousin) so if you happen to be after a film with Coppolas all over it, you’re not going to do better this week. But it’s Anderson’s film even so. She plays Shelly who, in the opening moments, is auditioning for a job saying she is 36 and then admitting to 42 even though she is obviously older. One has to commend Anderson, surely, for daring to actually look the age she is (57). She sings, she dances, her forehead moves!
We then flash back to the preceding weeks to understand where Shelly is at. For 30 years she had been part of Le Razzle Dazzle, an old school, topless feather and rhinestone revue. But one night the company manager (a quiet and affecting performance from Dave Bautista, otherwise a Marvel stalwart) gathers the troupe to deliver bombshell news. The show is due to close. Audiences have dwindled and it will be replaced by a ‘dirty circus’. From what we glimpse of the dirty circus it involves a woman spinning plates with the pole clenched by her vagina. (Though it’s tempting, I wouldn’t try this at home.)
Shelly is devastated. It’s been her whole life. There’s a touch of Willy Loman about her. She is an artist, she insists, and Le Razzle Dazzle is art. She may be delusional. We don’t see her dance until right at the end and though she pours her heart and soul into it she’s not very good technically. But she’s sacrificed everything, even her relationship with her estranged, hectoring daughter (Billie Lourd). She has to convince herself that it has all been worth it and maybe it has been. It’s only while performing, she says, that she has ever felt truly ‘seen’.
Anderson is wonderful, a revelation. I’d like to say I saw it coming but I did not. Did you?
The film is not plot-driven. It’s a character study as Shelly tries to work out what to do next. Her best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) is on hand. Annette is a casino waitress who wears 1970s frosted make-up and is also being aged out. Curtis is equally daring and unvain. There are two scenes – one with her clothes on and one with them mostly off – that aren’t at all flattering but are frank about what it is to not have a young body anymore. I wished for more about Annette, just as I wished Coppola’s camera would settle somewhere, anywhere. The film is directed in a hand-held, kinetic style that does give the necessary frazzled feel but also made me want to scream. Can’t we just stay put? For a bit? We’re never allowed to sit with any of the characters, which makes them feel underexplored. Elegiac as it is, the film doesn’t offer deep insights.
Anderson, however, is transfixing. She brings a breathy, broken, Marilyn-Monroe quality to the part, along with all the sexiness. (She may not be 36, or 42, but she is still wonderfully sexy.) I did not see it coming. Who’s next? David Hasselhoff?
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