The Last Showgirl – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Gia Coppola
Writer – Kate Gersten
Stars – Pamela Anderson, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis

Billy Wilder’s Hollywood classic, Sunset Boulevard (1950), gave us a celebrated insight into the ephemeral nature of cinematic fame, beauty and glamour.   Faded silent-era star, Norma-Desmond, can no longer cast a spell.  She may well have been ‘Mr. DeMille, I’m Ready for My Close-Up’  but he certainly wasn’t ready for her!  And so too in this sensitive and insightful vehicle for 1990s TV star Pamela Anderson, we have a shattering performance which treads comparable territory.  We are no longer on Sunset Boulevard, but instead, we are on the much grittier Las Vegas Boulevard (The Strip). We are in a world of escapism and voyeurism but one arguably in decline or at least transforming where the glamour shows, or what passed for glamour shows of the 1980s, no longer cut it with the punters in an age of virtual reality and more acrobatic Cirque du Soleil stage shows.  The eponymous stage show, Razzle Dazzle, is a Las Vegas version of the celebrated Lido de Paris cabaret, which itself ran from 1946 to 2022. The razzle has ceased to dazzle and we confront the remaining dancers with a looming two-week closure notice.   Of these, Shelley, is not only the oldest performer but has been with the show from the outset.  It is her life – and for its rhinestones and sequins – she has compromised her relationships and family commitments.  It has been her all.  Norma Desmond can fantasise about a future, which will not come.  Shelley has been living her fantasy and knows only too well that her future is a bleak one of waitressing in a cocktail bar or as a supermarket check-out assistant.  The cost of a lemon strikes her with fear – every cent counts.

This is directed by Gia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola. This is a low-budget, independent, film with a production budget of less than $2 million. This gives it an immediacy and almost documentary-like compelling urgency.   There are no glamorous Las Vegas casinos or hotels on show.   Most of the narrative takes place in a cramped dressing room (a real-life dressing room as it happens) and we can smell the grease paint and lipsticks which transforms a dedicated troupe of dancers into exotica for the voyeur.   But, ignoring the zeitgeist, this is no critique of the male gaze and instead is a celebration of the sisterhood and collegiality. We see a dedicated group of women working their asses off to earn a crust who at the same time create visions of themselves for their own pleasure as much as that of the paying public – or no longer paying as in this instance.

In Somerset Maugham’s 1937 novel Theatre, his heroine,  Julia Lambert, only feels alive and real when she is on stage.   So too with Pamela Anderson’s Shelley, she is only living and her true self when the curtain goes up and the music begins.  Informed very much by Anderson’s own life experience of the hard slog in this her first cinema vehicle we are given an insight into the real world behind the footlights, the world of shattered dreams, hopes and aspirations.  The Las Vegas Strip may be a dream but it is still not Broadway and while it may be a fantasy world it is a world of compromised fantasy.