Jamie Lee Curtis’s supporting role as the sixty-something Annette in “The Last Showgirl” is a master class in portraying — and honoring — female characters, their bodies, their pleasure and self-possession.
Annette is best friend and foil to Shelly (Pamela Anderson), the film’s central character and the “last showgirl” of the title.
Now a hard-drinking, hard-gambling, cocktail waitress, Annette spent years dancing in the Las Vegas cabaret revue where Shelly, 57, still appears: “Le Razzle Dazzle”— a throwback spectacle of topless women in jewel-encrusted bodysuits.
Shelly still loves the glitz (as does the film’s director, Gia Coppola, who lingers on it all with real delectation), reminiscing about her glory days in cabaret. But Annette isn’t interested in nostalgia or in sugar coating the grim future she confronts, having given her life to a job that left her with no savings, no pension, and no health insurance. “Bankers retire,” she tells a younger dancer, “I’m gonna work. Then I’m gonna work some more. And then I’m gonna die.”
Ms. Coppola films Annette with a frankness worthy of the character, granting us full view of every line and crease in her face — all accentuated by Annette’s orange-y foundation, orange-y hair, heavy blue eye shadow, and frosted lipstick — remnants of her late ’70s heyday.
Annette’s casino job subjects her to many indignities. She depends on handsy gamblers for tips and must truss herself into a kind of “sexy bellhop” uniform, consisting of nothing but a high-cut, cleavage-spilling bodysuit, tight orange polyester tailcoat, and an orange pillbox hat that fails to be jaunty — a downscale version of the lavish costumes she once wore.
But Ms. Curtis makes magic with that uniform in two particular scenes of subtlety and daring — one in which she takes it off, and one in which she keeps it on.
The first scene follows Annette into the casino locker room, where she’s changing out of her uniform (having been dismissed for the day by a manager who prefers younger waitresses). Shelly is with her, and the two dissect Shelly’s dismal love life as Annette disrobes.
The conversation continues as Annette wrestles her flesh free of its spandex prison, pillbox still on head. She’s left standing in her bra, thong, and sheer support pantyhose. The camera shoots Ms. Curtis here from multiple angles, each shot exposing a real, 65-year-old woman’s body, rounded tummy, slight sag, and all.
Yet the scene is not remarkable because Ms. Curtis lets us see her in her underwear. It’s remarkable because of Annette’s (and Ms. Curtis’s) utter comfort in her own skin. Annette never stops chatting with Shelly, and never makes a move to conceal or cover herself.
Also remarkable is the director’s refusal to objectify Annette’s body. It’s simply an organic part of the moment. And this, in turn, encourages viewers to take it similarly in stride: It’s just two women talking, and one is half-naked — as happens every day in gyms and dressing rooms.
Annette may be a former showgirl taking off her clothes, but this was not a striptease. What gets unveiled in the locker room is not a “body,” or a collection of fetishized parts, but a person. Annette has performed an anti-striptease.
Later, Ms. Coppola gives Ms. Curtis a second, poignant scene in which to reimagine — and undo — classic showgirl motifs. This time, a possibly drunk Annette, wearing her leg-and-bosom-revealing uniform, climbs atop a casino table and, unbidden, launches into a solo dance to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” the ’80s ballad of desperate longing. We can’t tell whether the music is actually playing or if it exists only inside Annette’s head, but it’s immaterial. The dance is a wholly internal experience for her.
Annette dances with more heart than mastery. She writhes and swivels, clenches and releases her fists, arches her back, runs her hands over her body, closes her eyes in concentration. And although she’s on a tabletop, a makeshift stage, it’s clear she is dancing for herself alone, enjoying her own sensuality, inhabiting her body from within.
We don’t know what prompted the impromptu dance (later, we learn of a crisis). But we do know that Annette is teetering on the edge of destitution, and we sense her need to escape something — “Every now and then I fall apart,” sings Bonnie Tyler in the background.
Dancing seems to offer that escape, and a way to reclaim, for a moment, control and power. The uniform doesn’t matter. Nor do the gawking passers-by, whom Annette never acknowledges. She dances not for, but in defiance of, those watching. This is the opposite of what a “showgirl” does — Annette is not making a “show,” and she is not a girl.
As a veteran of ’80s Hollywood, Ms. Curtis knows something about the limitations of “sexpot” roles, and her history adds depth to her performance here. Initially known for her statuesque figure and gamine looks, she found early fame playing “sexy” — as a “scream queen” in horror movies, a leotard-clad aerobics instructor in “Perfect,” or a tragic Playboy model in “Death of a Centerfold: The Dorothy Stratten Story.”
In recent years, Ms. Curtis has spoken often about resisting all the dieting and cosmetic interventions expected of actresses. (She has blamed plastic surgery for “wiping out generations of beauty.”) “This word ‘anti-aging’ has to be struck,” she said in an interview. “I am pro aging. I want to age with intelligence, and grace, and dignity, and verve, and energy. I don’t want to hide from it.”
“The Last Showgirl” is an elegiac look at women betrayed by a profession — and a society — that reduced them to objects of display and titillation. But it’s also a cri de coeur about humanity, female friendship, and everyday acts of resistance — a reminder of the richness and depth older women bring to the screen. In a recent sea of movies showcasing middle-age women of startlingly smooth skin and wraithlike figures, Ms. Curtis’s textured, subtle, and rigorously honest portrayal of Annette feels like a small-scale revolution.
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