The slogan “What Happens Here, Stays Here” has been officially promoting Las Vegas since 2003. In the fictional universe of the wistfully charming The Last Showgirl, that means dancer Shelly Gardner had been in town nearly a decade already. And here she stayed afterwards too, high-kicking in the same old-school casino revue, resplendent in the name Le Razzle Dazzle.
The film catches up with Shelly in the present. By now, the clock is at 30 years. And the show is over — or about to be. Le Razzle Dazzle, c’est mort.
She is played by Pamela Anderson, who gives her character a trace of Marilyn Monroe breathiness. But the shock is all too real for Shelly when she learns that Le Razzle Dazzle is being closed. The rest of the movie plays as a countdown to the final curtain, with an implied farewell to the vintage Vegas the younger Shelly was first drawn to. (Though the Rat Pack aren’t name-checked out loud, Siegfried and Roy are.)
Themes of faded glory turn up a lot in American movies. But one of the most likeable things about the film is its lightness of touch with any wider symbolism. Instead, director Gia Coppola pulls in close on Shelly, making a fine-grained character study that also takes in the people and place around her. (Jamie Lee Curtis is Annette, a cautionary tale of an old pal, scratching a living in the casinos.)
Backstage, the massed feather boas and lightbulb-ringed mirrors may give you flashbacks to Showgirls, the shrill 1995 cult classic (of sorts). All this time later, the tone is more collegiate. Yet the costumes are unchanged: still at once revealing and teetering and cumbersome. At least once, Shelly is physically undone by the scale of her wings.
The gulf between the crazed flamboyance of the outfits and the realities of the women wearing them — forever barely making the rent — catches Coppola’s eye. And then, of course, there is age. At 57, Shelly wears her work clothes better than many of us would our outfits of the 1990s. But the movie also knows that, if the show is now dated, Shelly has also grown older in it.
You suspect the point isn’t lost on Anderson either, who spent much of her screen career as a paragon of youthful hotness. The other movie that might come to mind is The Substance, in which another over-50 female lead, Demi Moore, is put through the wringer by the sexist sins of Hollywood. Yet The Substance is made with such a bare-bulb glare, it seems to gawp at Moore as well. The gaze of The Last Showgirl is at once more naturalistic and kind.
Indeed, the movie is filled with heady images of hardscrabble lives amid slot machines and desert sun. Truth be told, a cynic might squint at a portrait of the American margins made by the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola.
But count me out of the snark and consider me a fan of a film that packs real complexity into a crisp 88 minutes. If the approach is humane, it is also honest. Here and there, Coppola even risks Shelly seeming — shock horror — unsympathetic. We are trusted to be smart enough to handle it. More cheering still, so is Anderson. At 57 herself, the movie finally gives her new steps — and she dances them admirably.
★★★★☆
In UK cinemas from February 28 and in US cinemas now