You may be just as surprised to find a Werner Herzog cameo in Pamela Anderson’s breezy 2023 memoir “Love, Pamela” as you’d be to her see in one of his films. Nevertheless, a potential collaboration nearly happened, and the German auteur gave the Canadian bombshell a few words of career guidance: Never audition — hold out for directors who see your worth.
And now the Moviemaker Gia Coppola has built a dream character around Anderson and his surprising megawatt smile. In “The Last Showgirl”, Anderson’s first advance in a movie from “Barb Wire” in 1996, plays Shelly, a veteran Las Vegas dancer, used to be a sexual symbol. This is an existing Yen component for films that erect a fragile room of mirrors around a female icon to reflect how pop culture distorted its image. (See also “The substance”, has risen to a rite awards competitor only in the strength of the View you column, such as Anderson herself, Wafts for life as a marabou pen. It is less a story than an atmosphere.
Coppola recently called Anderson the “Marilyn [Monroe] of our time” for her intellectual curiosity. Anderson might have grown up culture-starved in rural British Columbia, but she feasted on the French New Wave as soon as she could, and here, she does a pretty good job at acting as though she’s in a Godard film herself, piling her hair on top of her head à la Brigitte Bardot and gazing off toward, presumably, Las Vegas’ half-scale Eiffel Tower as we stare at her and hope things work out. Shelly, who speaks in a heightened version of Anderson’s breathy coo, is a fellow Francophile. To her, her longtime gig at the Razzle Dazzle isn’t just some tacky nudie show — it’s “the last descendant of Parisian Lido culture.”
Everyone at Shelly’s Orbit thinks the Dazzle Razzle is a sticky Nudie show, adding her remote daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), her level maker Eddie (Dave Bautista), and her younger, more cynical colleagues Maryna (Song) and Jodie and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka).
We do not see the regime on the stage of Shelly until the final sequence, so for the maximum of the film, we do not know who to believe. The scenes are crazier if you laugh at Shelly’s artistic ambitions. (When he insists that the glamor of the dazzling glow is undeniable, Mary-Anne joked: “I can deny glamor”). Even so, if you stay with Shelly’s commitment, Kate Gersten’s script becomes more interesting.
Hollywood regularly insists that other people deserve to follow their dreams: Shelly even offers her recommendation to Hannah, an aspiring photographer. But the film poses a stick to the question: even that crazy dream?Is it imaginable to see Anderson’s dazzling creation in The Pink and Orange Feathers not only feminine, but also feminist?Is it feminist to rejoice: “Come on girl!” How will someone hit their dream of a cliff?
Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography looks at Shelly’s life the same way she does: What’s right in front is in focus, everything else is a blur. The truth is that Shelly can’t, or won’t, see her own future beyond the stage. She’s naive, but she’s no victim.
Coppola periodically reminds us that this bride can also be self-centered and mercurial and snobbish. The waitress is underneath, the adjacent erotic circus is too low, and as for the rockettes, she digs up everything that provides a “very redundant” kick. Early on, Eddie announced to speakers that the casino’s new owners shut down the glitzy fail in favor of anything more fashionable. As Eddie breaks the bad news, the addition of his Rumble with a soaring Whoom Whoomp and subtextual: Oops, Shelly missed the last helicopter of “Nam.
Anderson plays her real, as though she’s perhaps met variations of Shellys at Hugh Hefner’s grotto. She has a self-awareness that allows her to be at once sincere and girlish, while recognizing that strangers might find Shelly synthetic. Her Shelly is serious about her version of reality while not expecting others to conform to her delusions. Even Shelly’s mundane moments come with a tingle of the fantastical. Eating take-out Chinese with her daughter allows her to pretend she’s capable of normal relationships — one in which her pasties aren’t the priority. In actuality, Shelly can’t even get a date (and the one feint at romance is forced).
No one roots for an industry that chews up women. Yet how should we feel about a woman who keeps throwing herself in the meat grinder expecting to be reborn as filet mignon? One casting director (Jason Schwartzman) seems offended when Shelly tries to pass herself off as 36, about as long as she’s been shimmying in the show.
At 85 minutes, “The Last Showgirl” can feel as padded as a flexion bra; He tries to convince us that it is a feature film for adults. It persists in thorough tabs and foam rollers and Shelly slow motion sequences posing in roofs and medium streets than more and more aerated and ridiculous.
I like that Shelly treats the kaleidoscopic desert sun like a spotlight — but would she really drive to an empty gravel lot to pose for no one? Some of the details feel marvelously resonant, especially how the off-the-clock Shelly never can scrub off every speck of glitter, or the way she keeps ripping her costume wings like some cabaret Icarus. The movie works hard to repeat the point that she’s a woman out of time. Her fondness for black-and-white musicals is lovely, but her retro Walkman goes too far (as does the VCR in the Razzle Dazzle’s break room).
But there is genuine in the concept that a user can freeze at the age of feeling the utmost confident. For Shelly, this means dressed in a denim washed through acid. Meanwhile, his older colleague Annette (a Jamie Lee Curtis, stupid shutter) wears the frozen white lipstick and a hair color so odd you can’t believe what she sorted into the pharmacy domain. (GingerDead? Strawberry Futility?)
Curtis has some of my favorite lines in the movie (“What, do you think I have a 501k?”) plus a great burlesque sequence where she impulsively climbs onto a platform and gyrates to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for an apathetic casino crowd. It’s a long scene (gotta get your money’s worth of Bonnie Tyler) that goes on until the competing dings and chimes of the gaming machines break the spell. You could plop her performance into a big Hollywood comedy and it would work just as well.
Only the Anderson component with all his nebulae contradictions, neither comedian nor tragic, neither pathetic nor heroic, nor sophisticated nor striking, seems to transcend more than the film around him, Anderson wins our respect. Everything looks with Herzog.
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