Review: the last showgirl

The Last Showgirl
Streaming

Veteran Vegas dancer Shelly, in increasingly threadbare garters, wilting feathered headdress and frayed silk wings, radiates a thousand-watt smile as she gears up for one exhausting last lap of the showbiz track. The camera is soft, vaseline-smeared around the edges, framing unsaturated hues of faded glamor. Her job, her life, is performing in ‘The Razzle Dazzle’, a creaking fixture at a resort in transition. Even the name feels out of time. The implied missing word, ‘old’ (as in, “Give ‘em the old razzle dazzle”), hangs limply in the air, like a deflating disco ball. 

Pamela Anderson stars as the aging optimist, juggling past mistakes with a blinkered positive attitude that gets bolted on every day as she repairs her weathered costumery. The Razzle Dazzle is coming to an end, being replaced by bawdy circuses with ever more lurid acrobatics. 18 punters a night cannot sustain this ungainly throwback - “We were like rockstars, a spectacle!” says Shelly, defending its legacy. But, like the song says, that was thirty years ago, when they used to have a show. 

It’s a firecracker of a performance by Anderson, the parallels to the injustices and seedy manipulations of her own career presumably weighing on her mind in every take. We could reference Demi Moore in The Substance, or Micky Rourke in The Wrestler, the clinging onto the grubby coattails of an industry with desperate fingertips, a business that has drained them of what was once needed, but which now distances itself from them at light speed. 

We’re given vignettes rather than real story arks. There’s the emotional wreckage of courting an estranged daughter, and a half-hearted attempt at romance with the socially-awkward, aging stage manager (played with moving empathy by Dave Bautista), but director Gia Coppola keeps us involved enough in this rhinestone-clad existential crisis. 

Shelley argues with her much younger dancer cohorts (the excellent Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song) that The Razzle Dazzle has class, honoring a long line of French tradition. “It’s Parisian Lido culture,” she announces to a mostly-bored dressing room. For them, it’s just another softcore nudie gig with a paycheck: “It’s just a job that pays American dollars!” replies Song as she applies the cumbersome upholstery of her trade.

At home, Shelly dances along balletically to old 16mm projections. In her mind, she’s a cultured entertainer, the most glamorous artiste in the trailer park, but it’s an increasingly debilitating delusion. She’s not Margot Fonteyn, she’s Tawdry Hepburn. I mean that less cruelley than it reads, because in many ways, she’s admirable, supportive and, as she maintains throughout, just doing the best she can (-can). 

The most memorable scenes, though, come with the whirlwind support of Jamie Lee Curtis. Her fake-tan-daubed Annette is a hard-as-iron cocktail waitress in a downbeat casino, withered by decades of sulphuric lighting and cigarette smoke, but gamely punching her way through every single shift. Both Curtis and Anderson have euphoric solo dance scenes that let the light shine out of their hearts, if only for one last song. They may be crying every night into their homemade margaritas, but The Old Razzle Dazzle can still sometimes paste on a smile, flip off the world and hold its head high. (PO)