The Last Showgirl
Jamie Lee Curtis grooving to Total Eclipse of the Heart is one of the few highlights in this disappointing study of a Las Vegas showgirl approaching the end of her career
In Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson is Shelly, a seasoned Las Vegas dancer with a breathy, Marilyn Monroe voice and heart of gold as well as a complicated domestic life. Her best days are behind her and ties with her daughter (Billie Lourd) are strained (understandably), and despite embracing her 'found' family (Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Jamie Lee Curtis), she spends nights alone, dancing in front of ballerinas on a home movie projector.
Gia Coppola spent a lot of time on set with her aunt Sofia growing up and it shows: the film’s world is like The Bling Ring or The Virgin Suicides through osmosis, shot through a hazy, vaseline-smeared lens. From the showgirl outfits to Jamie Lee Curtis’s frosted lips and blue glittery eyeshadow to a Vegas supermarket, it’s a world of baby pinks and powder blues, rhinestone and glitter, only here it's tacky, more Spring Breakers than Marie Antoinette. The aesthetic, like candied confetti, is one of femininity on ketamine. Yet it's somehow both overly saccharine and lacking in heart, leaving you feeling empty and cold amid all that desert heat.
Despite the spunk of Curtis’s performance (a spontaneous midday dance in the middle of a hectic casino to Total Eclipse of the Heart is my favourite kind of fever dream), the rest of the cast can't help elevate the film, resulting in what feels like a disconnected rich kid’s fantasy of what kooky, poor people with crushed dreams must be like.
Released 28 Feb by Picturehouse Entertainment; certificate 15