Film review: Illusion and self-delusion as The Last Showgirl looks at a changing Las Vegas
Stunning performances in dreamily shot ode to women cast aside as Sin City leaves the rhinestone era
Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl.
The Last Showgirl opens at SilverCity Riverport and other Cineplex Theatres on January 17
RHINESTONES PLAY A starring role in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, piled with feathers and gloves in dressing-room pan shots and tinkling as dancers head out from backstage in their shimmery costumes. As gemstone wannabes they’re a perfect symbol for a film that looks at the cheaper reality of the glittery mirage of Las Vegas.
Filmed on grainy 16mm stock, The Last Showgirl has an aching, dreamy feel as it tells the story of the women who’ve helped construct that illusion of glamour—and the way they’re discarded as Sin City changes into an edgier, upscale destination.
B.C.’s Pamela Anderson makes a career-defining performance as the baby-voiced Shelly, a slightly ditzy, 50-something showgirl who’s spent 30 years playing a lead role in Le Razzle Dazzle casino spectacle that is set to be cancelled. A “dirty circus” is scheduled to take its place. She takes pride in the work she’s been doing since the ’80s, likening herself to the can-can girls of old Paris. “Breasts and rhinestones and joy!” she calls it, without an ounce of irony. It’s clear from her dated house with the empty communal pool that she needs the paycheque. Watch her try to practise her smile in the mirror before showtime right after a crying jag.
Shelly is restless, flitty, and deeply flawed—a hot mess of contradictions. On one hand, she’s trying hard to reconnect with the daughter Hannah (a riveting Billie Lourd) she neglected, attempting to bond over both of their dreams as “artists”. But the resentful Hannah, who’s studying at university as a photographer, doesn’t quite see things that way. Shelly also plays den mother to the lost younger dancers in her troupe, but is too absorbed in her own stress to help them when it really matters. And yet you have to admire her grit, even if it’s fuelled a bit by the self-delusion she needs to survive.
Some of the film’s best moments come in her scenes with Jamie Lee Curtis’s hardened ex-dancer Annette—complete with leathered bottle tan, bad auburn dye job, frosted lipstick and eyeshadow, and a cigarette sutured to her fingers (a kind of trashy sister to her matriarch on The Bear). She’s turned to “cocktailing” in a casino, carrying on full conversations with Shelly while guys shove tips into her bra.
At first it seems like gruff but softhearted stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista) might offer the love and support Shelly needs—but that trajectory would be too simplistic for this film.
These are small, compelling character portraits heightened by Coppola’s artful direction. Long, heady scenes feature women looking over the Vegas strip, the desert sunset glinting off tacky glass buildings. Frequently, characters break into a dance all their own, on streets, in their living rooms—and in Curtis’s most stunning sequence, alone on a riser in a casino where the slot players don’t even notice.
In The Lost Showgirl, Coppola dances to her own offbeat groove, too, riffing on broken dreams, ephemeral youth, and the lies we tell ourselves—rooting out a kind of sad magic amid the rhinestones and fake smiles. 
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