Pamela Anderson stars as Shelly Gardner in Sofia Coppola's 'The Last Show', a bittersweet tale of a fading burlesque show in Las Vegas facing closure.
Emerging from a flurry of pink and orange feathers, seasoned showgirl Shelly Gardner (Pamela Anderson ) frantically walks the route from her dressing room to the backstage of Le Razzle Dazzle, a dwindling casino burlesque and “the last show of its kind” on the Las Vegas Strip. She bemoans the presence of a rogue door knob that tugs at the fabric of her elaborate getup, unaware that the show will be abruptly cancelled after its 38-year run.
The film observes the demise of old-world eroticism with warmth instead of heat – a simple, if somewhat anodyne, comeback vehicle for Anderson, who plays Shelly with care and exasperation in her first leading role since 1996, which was panned to the point of multiple “Worst Actress” nominations. Here, the actress has room to play both within and outside of her star persona, and she invigorates the character to the utmost, given the anemic script. After the casino replaces Le Razzle Dazzle with an erotic circus act, Shelly and her younger peers are cast out to the economy of sleazy auditions that favour youth. Two ensemble dancers, Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), are far less precious about their work than Shelly, who holds an inflated impression of the show and takes any opportunity to defend its integrity and European sensibilities. Sympathetic to her losses are Shelly’s friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a showgirl turned cocktail waitress contending with the occupation’s callous ageism, and the ambling, oblivious revue producer Eddie (Dave Bautista). Perhaps it is the turbulence of the show’s impending closure that stirs Shelly to phone her estranged daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), a college student whose childhood felt eclipsed by her mother’s commitment to Le Razzle Dazzle. The pair’s attempts at reconciliation are deliberately stilted, filtered through the impending closure of the show; in one awkward moment, Shelly invites Hannah to attend, catching herself midway through as she recalls the toplessness. With her third feature, Coppola establishes a kind of “vibes”-driven cinema: ideologically sparse but dressed with intimate, granular visuals, often giving the sense of a protracted music video. The romantic glow of cabaret aesthetics in close proximity to the brash, jangly casino landscape does well to parallel the collision of eras and sensibilities on display. But the starry-eyed spin on the film’s ending, which glosses over its established conflicts, feels detached and suggestive of better last-hurrah films set in Vegas, in which the pendulum of Vegas strip culture swings violently away from the nostalgia Coppola indulges. Verhoeven’s perverted vaudeville is in another orbit, surely, but at least it had no pretensions about the hazards or precarity of such environments. More assured is Coppola’s treatment of legacy; Anderson’s career has split the difference between lowbrow success – she has graced more Playboy covers than any other model and had a five-year stint on – and tabloid ridicule. In playing Shelly, who is ruminating on the gaudy glamour of a career spent under a spotlight, she parallels her own experiences of objectification and being pigeonholed. Notably, the cast is rounded out by former child stars (Song, Shipka) and actors born into celebrated families (Curtis, Lourd). (Coppola, of course, also carries a regal Hollywood signifier in her surname, the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola.) The sentiment of being thrown to the margins of an industry that seemed predestined to carry you is certainly an interesting point of departure, but the resulting film often feels stagnant, unable to square its romantic impulses – as a frustrated Shelly puts it in one scene, “this is breasts and rhinestones and joy!” – with the fraught realities of these characters
LASVEGAS BURLESQUE CLOSING ANDERSON COPPOLA
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