The first moments of The Last Showgirl hit like a static shock. We know the face that occupies its frames – shot tight, unnervingly tight – all too well. It belongs to Pamela Anderson, the pop culture behemoth and unfairly maligned bombshell who, in recent years, has wrested back the narrative through a stint in Chicago on Broadway, a paired autobiography and documentary, and a decision to go makeup free at public events. She’s come into full ownership, now, of the power that was always hers, generated by that megawatt smile, in those hazy blue eyes and peroxide blonde curls.
In Gia Coppola’s portrait of an artist in the midst of identity collapse, though, Anderson’s Shelly Gardner, a showgirl we first meet mid-audition, seems shockingly vulnerable. Her smile is a nervous twitch. Her eyes dart left and right. When an offscreen voice (Jason Schwartzman, cousin to Coppola, who’s the granddaughter of Francis Ford) asks Shelly her age, it’s as if she’s just been struck by the interrogator’s spotlight. “36?” she whimpers. “Sorry, I lied, I’m 42.” She’s 57. “Distance helps!” she jokes.
It doesn’t feel quite right to say The Last Showgirl is Anderson’s comeback role. But it does feel significant – a way to memorialise, on film, the kind of career she’s wanted to shape for herself, by playing a character who’s less an echo of herself than an echo of what she’s had to fight against. There is something raw and honest in all of Shelly’s self-effacing giggles. Coppola’s film doesn’t just tackle the cruel dismissal of women who dare to age, but of every modern artist’s deepest fear: that the day will come when the bottom falls out of their industry, leaving them with nothing to show for it but a lifetime of sacrifice.
Shelly has been with the Vegas revue show Le Razzle Dazzle for three decades. Her younger colleagues, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), don’t value their work beyond the paycheque. But Shelly feels immense pride in it and can barely sustain a conversation without alluding to its prestige origins as “the last descendant of Parisian Lido culture”. So when the show’s producer Eddie (Dave Bautista, proving he’s at his best in quiet, soulful roles) announces its closure, it’s accompanied by the drone sound of Shelly’s entire universe imploding.
Is she valiant or delusional? Coppola doesn’t let us see much of Le Razzle Dazzle itself, and not until the very end, and Shelly’s elegant descriptions are always combated by other people’s dismissal of it as a “stupid nudie show”. But all artists are delusional, to a degree, and Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s grainy 16mm cinematography invites us to scrutinise faces and emotions while the borders around them – the stuff that makes up concrete reality – are largely a blur.
At the heart of Kate Gersten’s script lives a small found family living under less-than-ideal circumstances. Shelly’s best friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis) insists she’ll die in her cocktail waitress uniform; Jodie and Mary-Anne cling to Shelly and Eddie as unwilling parental figures, while Shelly’s actual daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd), remains detached and bitter under the belief her mother chose her career over her child.
Coppola’s previous films, Palo Alto (2013), about disaffected teenagers, and Mainstream (2020), about the lure of viral popularity, were similarly centred around people trapped in their own minor delusions. But the director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer. Shelly lingers around car parks and grimy rooftops, adorned in all her rhinestones and feathers. We’re watching her write her own poetry.
Dir: Gia Coppola. Starring: Pamela Anderson, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd, Dave Bautista and Jamie Lee Curtis. 15, 89 minutes.
‘The Last Showgirl’ is in cinemas from 28 February
