TIFF 2024: ‘The Last Showgirl’: Pamela Anderson Like You’ve Never Seen Before

A showgirl steps onto an empty stage, a large, pink, sequined hat askew on her head. A faceless voice asks her how old she is, how tall she is, and what she has prepared. We can almost hear her breathing as her feet shuffle and echo through that normally packed room, and we recognize that sense of unease as this showgirl stands vulnerable and ready to bare her emotions through performance. What we all recognize, though, that this showgirl, Shelly, is portrayed by Pamela Anderson. The knockout, the bombshell. In Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson reintroduces herself, and you have never see her like this before.

Le Razzle Dazzle is the kind of Las Vegas strip show that is associated with a bygone era. There are towering, feathered headpieces and dripping jewels as dancers undulate their pelvises and waft their arms, and it seems outdated. Shelly has called Le Razzle Dazzle home since the late 80s–she even had a featured solo until 1999–and she tells her younger castmates how they should consider themselves lucky to strut the hallowed halls of such an iconic show. Shelly could’ve auditioned for other shows, and she reveals how she even tried out New York City to be a Rockette. “I found all that kicking to be very redundant,” she says.

With Le Razzle Dazzle’s ticket sales in a tailspin and another circus-themed show taking up the stage during the high-traffic weekend slots, the dancers discover that the show will close in two weeks. The other dancers try to find other work, but the realization doesn’t quite hit Shelly at first. She sits at her station and paints her gorgeous face even though we know that the fear is settling in.

Jamie Lee Curtis’ Annette, a cocktail waitress, offers to help find Shelly get another job, but she is battling her own demons. Curtis, in full spray tan regalia, gives Annette a knowing bravado, but she and Shelly share the phobias of the world shutting them out. Brenda Song and Kiernan Shipka, as Shelly’s fellow dancers, both yearn for a mother figure, but Shelly isn’t prepared to give them what they think they need. Billie Lourd, as Shelly’s daughter, keeps coming around as if she knew the mother who was never there for her needs help more than ever. Lourd gives a earnest, heartbreaking performance.

You cannot look away from Anderson as Shelly spirals deeper into her own sadness. Coppola–who told the premiere audience at TIFF that she always wanted to make a film set in Vegas–uses every lightbulb and reflection to her advantage, and we realize that Shelly has to keep seeing her own smile no matter where she goes. The posters of Le Razzle Dazzle still use a photo of when Shelly first joined the show, and that smile threatens to fall off her face every time she takes a last look in the mirror before going on stage. Anderson gives those smiles a tragic tension, a way of comforting herself before her inevitable future crumbles down around her. There are many sequences of Shelly twirling around a dressing room or in the Vegas heat as she listens to music, a woman who cannot let go of the performer she has adored so much for so long. Anderson never loses that lightness in her voice, that bubbliness that hints to Shelly’s idealistic love of dance and her own curiosity. This is a moment when you see a performer finally given the opportunity to grab ahold of meaty material, and this is the role that Anderson has been waiting her whole life for. There is hunger in her performance, and Anderson is incredible.

This might be Shelly’s last dance, but it just might be Anderson’s first.

The Last Showgirl is currently seeking distribution.