Director: Gia Coppola

Stars: Pamela Anderson, Brenda Song, Kiernan Shipka, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis, Billie Lourd, Brenda Song

Gia Coppola’s film feels like an obvious attempt to do for star Pamela Anderson what ‘The Wrestler’ did for Mickey Rourke. It feels heartfelt enough but underwhelms on the script front. Anderson is Shelly Gardner, a fifty-seven-year-old dancer who has performed for three decades at Le Razzle Dazzle, a review at a casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip. The younger women she works with, including Mary-Anne (Song) and Jody (Shipka), see her as a mother figure. Shelly’s closest and oldest friend is Annette (Lee-Curtis), a plain-speaking ex-dancer who now works as a cocktail waitress. Shelly’s life begins to unravel with the announcement that show’s run is being scaled back in favour of a more modish Burlesque show. Shelly reaches out to her estranged daughter Hannah (Carrie Fisher’s daughter Lourd who should be familiar with showbiz moms) who had been brought up by foster parents, but their meeting goes badly, due to Shelly’s ignorance of her daughter’s life and Hannah’s emotionally distanced manner. Anderson is good enough in this tailored vehicle, her character speaking in a breathy Marilyn Monroe style voice. Better though is Shipka as the tough but tender Jody, and Lee-Curtis as the tragic Annette. While the plot feels a little rote, Coppola’s renderings of the pungent shabby club and the sun-parched merciless Las Vegas exterior is impressively realised, and the film’s depiction of female solidarity affecting.

David Willoughby

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