The makers of “The Last Showgirl” (Utopia), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, made a string of excellent decisions which collectively produced an unusually compact and highly thought-provoking film.
The premise of the film is an exploration of the all-too-real question: what happens when a long-term job suddenly ends, and earlier sacrifices made for that job come flooding back as regrets?
A Pamela Anderson on absolutely top form is cast as the mother with that job: Shelly, a “showgirl” in “Razzle Dazzle,” a Las Vegas show. The sacrifice made for the dancing job was her daughter, Hannah, who appears back in Mum’s life just as the show been cancelled to make way for a circus.
The film is kept from meandering by a very wise decision to set its events between the day the cast is told about the show’s closure to its last actual performance, 2 weeks later. This neatly bookends the action and allows the film to focus on the short term. What is laid out for us to consider is the cast’s immediate reaction to the news: shock, crisis, frantic arrangements for the future (“If I don’t have the show, what will I do for Christmas?”) We are not shown the period after the adrenaline of the last few shows has drained away to leave despair and depression, nor the later phase still when grieving has been processed and the cast has “moved on.” This fixes the film unusually closely on Shelly and her immediate needs: one, to find another job; and two, to react to the appearance of her daughter (now in her early 20s (we assume)) in Las Vegas; a daughter abandoned outside the theatre in the car park while her Mum was dancing inside, because Shelly couldn’t afford childcare.
The first need is further focused by the introduction of a solid minor part, Annette, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. Annette is 83 and works in “cocktailing” (a casino waitress, serving complementary drinks to high-spending gamblers). Annette has nothing to show for her work; she has spent all her money gambling, smoking and (especially) drinking. There is an incredibly sad scene which shows a part of Annette’s job, to stand on a 1-person disco podium and dance suggestively to the famous 1983 Bonnie Tyler song “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” But every time the roving eye of the camera pans away, so that we can see the gamblers and people-watchers in the casino around her, nobody, but nobody is watching. She is irrelevant. As Shelly auditions for a new dancing job, the penny drops: she has grown too old for the changing tastes in the hard world of the Vegas casino business. She isn’t attractive to those (men?) that choose performers. She doesn’t have “it” anymore. But maybe nobody is buying the “it” she could sell 38 years earlier these days. We are told Vegas is much more interested in the circus. Indeed as I considered what higher-end dance might look like in 2025, I settled on the human-circus (there is one in Cardiff called “No Fit State” which has a huge following) and modern ballet, exemplified by the work of Matthew Bourne, which is quite frequently shown here at the Playhouse. “Razzle Dazzle” is completely passé – that is after all why it is closing.
The second part of the tightly-scripted action revolves around Shelley’s relationship with daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd). Much of the emotional subtext is to ask the audience to consider what is a “bad mum,” this being the personification of a “terrible person.” What I really loved was that the film did not produce the picture-perfect “good mum” as a foil to Shelly. We were left to consider the experience of Shelly/Hannah and compare it with our own subconscious preconceived ideas of “good” vs “bad” motherhood. The filmmakers executed this strategy very cleverly indeed through the visual clues of the movie’s production design (Shelly lives in a small one-bed house under the Vegas airport landing path, eating microwave dinners and Chinese takeaway). As her daughter comes to watch “Razzle Dazzle” after all those years of her mum performing the showgirl role day-in-day-out, there is such a poignant scene where they come face-to-face with each other, and Hannah is willing to be honest with her mum: the show is awful (“a spectacle of dancing nudes”) and there is hardly anyone in the audience. A one/two punch if you like. Not only is her daughter unimpressed, perhaps even ashamed that Mum has wasted her best years in something so dreadful, but this view is shared by society at large who don’t support the show enough for it to continue. Meanwhile, Mum is living in completely delusion – she believes that the show is classy because once upon a time Amex used it for a publicity photoshoot!!
Is this a story about women? Yes. Is it a story that will only appeal to women? It shouldn’t be. It is a beautifully told but painful story about the ramifications of a decision; about priorities and choices; about becoming irrelevant as we age. We don’t know if it is even a story about resilience, because Shelly’s future is not revealed. There is no happy ending or resolution. There are a great number of scenes in the dressing room, as the women help each other get in and out or costume, gossip and speculate. This helps maintain an awareness that all of the “showgirls” are facing the same axe. It provokes a sense that they are all in this together. But wait, at the same time there must be competition – surely not all of them can get a new job dancing in Las Vegas?
Finally, it is surely not an accident that the only man in the film is the only one to have been retained by casino to stay on and work at the circus. Why? Because he is the floor director, a nicely “transferable” role.
Adam Poole
11 March 2025
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