By Luke Goodsell for the ABC
Who is Pamela Anderson? That might seem like a strange question to pose about someone who's been a pop culture fixture for the better part of four decades but, if anything, the blonde bombshell's ubiquity has rendered her an enigma, a star for whom fame is her greatest performance.
Sure, everyone can picture the slow-motion sequence of her striding across a Santa Monica beach in that iconic red swimsuit, or vaguely recall the rock-babe celebrity scandal of it all, but what do we really know of the woman, and the work that goes into the construction of such a talismanic American image?
Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl, in which Anderson plays a Vegas dancer staring down the end of an era, serves as a reckoning with our image of a star who has recently - in her 2023 memoir and documentary - taken back control of her narrative.
The former Baywatch star plays Shelly Gardner, a 57-year-old dancer in the revue Le Razzle Dazzle, which - not unlike Anderson - got its start in the 80s but has become something of a relic in the Disney-fied Vegas of the Sphere and other massive spectacles.
Among the troupe of dancers, Shelly acts as a den mother to her younger colleagues, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), a chosen family that Coppola captures with hand-held camera in a series of tender backstage vignettes.
Photo: Madman Films
Their producer - played by a wonderfully warm Dave Bautista - has worked to protect the show but, faced with dwindling attendance, Le Razzle Dazzle will soon be cancelled to make way for a kind of erotic Cirque du Soleil that Shelly dismisses as "a dirty circus".
The Last Showgirl bears witness to lives on the margins of big entertainment, where the lure of fame can vanish at the whim of commerce. "Las Vegas used to treat us like movie stars," says Shelly, who's gone from being feted on international tours to living in a dilapidated mid-century house that she's transformed into a chintzy Graceland.
It's not like there are many options for an ageing showgirl, as evidenced by a former dancer played by Jamie Lee Curtis, chewing the scenery as a cocktail waitress in an industrial layer of spray tan.
Coppola, making her third feature after Palo Alto (2013) and the largely ignored Mainstream (2020), is sensitively attuned to the experience of these women, finding beauty and grace among their struggle and anxiety.
She shares her famous aunt's sense of space and detail - though, where Sofia has become ever more precise and distilled, Gia is loose and expressive, letting her camera float like a headpiece plume in the Nevada breeze.
Her Vegas is an oblique tapestry of cold dawns and empty parking lots, of razed building sites, tiny apartments and slot machine floors where 'Dance Hall Days' echoes into infinity.
The filmmaker's gauzy lyricism - half the movie feels comprised of Anderson twirling against diffuse sunlight - won't be to everyone's taste, but Coppola's style is an essential part of The Last Showgirl's substance. It suggests a town buried in the psychic layers of history, a purgatory for souls doomed to wander its garish present. L'appel du vide!
Jamie Lee Curtis plays Shelly's best friend Annette in The Last Showgirl, which was shot in 18 days in Las Vegas Photo: Madman films
Less successful are elements of Kate Gestren's screenplay, such as a subplot involving Shelly's estranged daughter (Billie Lourd), a college student who arrives to pour scorn on her mother and fulfil the obligatory hint of redemption.
It's the one off-key note in an otherwise tough, clear-eyed study in the precarious nature of glamour. What happens, the movie wonders, to a life dedicated to an art form that no longer holds currency - be it dancing in Vegas or posing for Playboy - where a performer's livelihood is their ageing body?
The weight of Anderson's own career hangs over a moment in which Shelly auditions for the brutally expedient - though no less misogynist - producer of the new burlesque circus, played by an almost unrecognisable Jason Schwartzman. It's here that the star's famously feathery voice finally breaks, and a lifetime of objectification explodes in a scream.
That no-one respects Shelly's artistry might be read as an analogy for Anderson's life, where the art of playing the fizzy, pin-up ideal is rarely ever given its due credit - something that's plagued almost every screen blonde, from Marilyn right up to the present.
Shelly not only understands the appeal of a show that gives its audience "breasts and rhinestones and joy', as she exclaims at one point, but also its power and sense of belonging - a spotlight that amounts to being seen.
In showing the labour, talent and personal sacrifice that goes into the image, The Last Showgirl gets at something about Anderson to which we've never really been exposed - the actor, and the artist, behind the icon.
"This is the beginning of my career," she told Us Weekly of her performance. A star is reborn.
