(There’s a reason why film-makers are routinely drawn to the glaring, garish lights of Las Vegas: in its spangliest strips, it feels more movie set than city, the kind of place it’s hard to imagine people living everyday lives 24/7. Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl – streaming on Mubi from 18 April – is quite rare in its focus on one such person: Shelly, a dancer in a long-running revue on the Vegas strip, now pushing 60 and at a crossroads when said revue announces its imminent closure. Short and light on plot, it’s a character study built on a poignant night-and-day contrast, as Shelly literally performs a glitzy Vegas dream that all looks a bit shabby by daylight in her modest bungalow in the desert suburbs. Pamela Anderson affectingly brings her own career baggage to the role of someone who takes her art more seriously than anyone takes her, in a film intent on stripping the city of some varnish.
It certainly gives Vegas showgirls a better name than, well, Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s tacky (and, despite the critical mauling it received in 1995, vastly entertaining) tale of a young dancer intent on working her way up a slippery pole – with all manner of exploitative svengalis and sharp-clawed rivals standing between her and her showgirl dream. If she saw Coppola’s film, she might not be so keen.
