A couple of new “movies about strippers”

Monday is about movies, and sometimes TV. Today, I look at Anora and The Last Showgirl as part of the new way forward when it comes to “movies about strippers”

I liked the movie Anora, but I wanted to love it. I liked it. But it fell away, its second half almost barely even there, certainly adding nothing — beyond a faux tension.

Anora is a performance in search of a movie big enough to hold it, but it is also a Sean Baker movie, so there are fans ready to defend what it is that he does. A Baker movie is often a ‘small’ film about a big thing — and he does that very well, always. And that is what Anora starts off as, but the propulsion of it, the feelings it conjures, the tension that is created, all promises so much more — and for it to just meander to its ending — admittedly its very end is great, and reminds you of the other wonderful performance that was there in the film all along — is to under-deliver on the back of a powerhouse first half.

The Last Showgirl plays its hand more evenly; doesn’t just rely on one or two great performances — every lead/supporting player in this film deeply understood the assignment. And it is also a somewhat ‘small’ film about a much bigger, and maybe even more ‘invisible’ thing.

The Last Showgirl is being marketed as the ‘serious film you didn’t know Pamela Anderson had in her’ — ah, those are my clumsy words, not the actual marketing tagline by the way. But yeah, this is a bit like when Adam Sandler was in Punch Drunk Love, or when Steve Carell was in Foxcatcher, but it’s a woman, not known for comedy (not really), and known largely for being oggled — for male gaze objectification, and for somewhat ‘lightweight’ acting roles by virtue of her being there as eye-candy first and foremost. Here there’s a subversion, something close to the real life struggle of Pam Anderson is hinted at in The Last Showgirl. In recent years we’ve had Anderson release her memoir, and a documentary, and then run the makeup-free this is actually how I look/how I am campaign. Not knocking any of that, just saying, that’s been the run of events — in a bid to be taken seriously later in life.

So when Anderson is cast as Shelly Gardner, a 57-year-old Vegas showgirl, with three decades of that work under her belt, we can’t help but make connections to the real life Pam Anderson struggle, and work history. This is, in the end, stunt casting, basically. But it works. It’s correct. And Anderson is very good in the film.

But everyone is very good in this film. Gia Coppola (granddaughter of Francis, niece of Sophia, part of one of the biggest and most successful of Hollywood dynasties) is the director. She made another small film a decade ago that I rather liked (Palo Alto) and the script was created by Kate Gersten, based on her own play — which I understand was never produced in the end — called Body of Work.

Anderson is great, Jamie Lee Curtis is excellent. Dave Bautista shows even more range as he continues to impress on the big screen. And there’s super supporting work by Kieran Shinkansen, Billie Lourd, and Jason Schwartzman (also part of the Coppola dynasty, a cousin of Gia’s).

There’s a sadness to The Last Showgirl for many reasons, the typecasting of a person in a role that becomes their life, and they are happy with the gig, because it becomes them. Then the gig moves on, is outmoded, replaced, so, therefore the person in the show doing the gig is also moved on, outmoded, replaced — and they never quite see it coming. In that sense, The Last Showgirl made me think of Darren Aronofsky’s wonderful 2008 picture, The Wrestler. If you remember, Mickey Rourke is an aging wrestler, so committed to the bit that he just can’t see himself being aged out of the ‘sport’, even though he’s long since been part of the big time.

Maybe these stories resonate with me further as I approach 50. These characters in their 50s, lost and lonely and so utterly replaceable and yet they never saw that day coming. I do not feel any of those things by the way, I am not lost, I am not lonely, and I had my ‘outmodedness’ delivered to me when I was 30, and then again when I was 40. Frankly, I’m looking forward to 50. And then 60 Bring it! Bring both. Just make sure they’re deliver in the right order of course!

Which isn’t to say that the Anora story — Mikey Madison plays a young sex worker — did not resonate with me. I thought it was compelling work, right up until the middle of the film. Maybe I’m missing something, and other viewers might think the movie carried on, was made better, etc — but I felt a five-star film just lose its way and drop down to four or three by the end. Whereas The Last Showgirl is a three or four star movie that just moves in a nice line, and keeps the very human drama happening at an even tempo, so that ambitiously, even if cautiously, it might even one day be viewed as a five star film. That’s the sort of trajectory I prefer in a movie. I realise my captious comments about Anora could be held against me as some sort of prejudice, so I’m overwriting this point to say that is not the case. I loved the premise, the central performance was incredible, the look and feel of the film sublime, I thought we were heading for something along the lines of Uncut Gems, tension-ratchet wise. And you know I love that film!

But, as I’ve said, Anora simply falls away. For me.

I can’t help but see something about the films that links them though — and this is positive. I somewhat suggested The Last Showgirl to be “The Wrestler for strippers” — and before you “ @ ME “ — I do know that a showgirl is not a stripper, an exotic dancer is something different too, or can be, and that the term ‘sex worker’ as an umbrella of sorts across the industry is now used, and that’s a positive thing, and though Anora’s character is also referred to as a stripper, and works in a strip club, and this is all out there and in the language of the film, the movie’s true celebration is in the detailed view of the life of a stripper/sex-worker, and the legitimate job, and the legitimate person behind (or inside) that job.

That’s been a big part of Baker’s work, the milieu he is not merely mining, but advocating for — and I’m all for that by the way.

I feel like Movies about Strippers to use a blunt term, and to sneak The Last Showgirl into that, and if that term, or Showgirl’s inclusion is too reductive for you, I’m not even sorry, the explanation has been there in this writing all along the way, will always sell. And for one obvious reason: It is at the acceptable (PG/ish) end of the ‘porn’ scale. It is not pornography at all, but to a general audience there is the idea of some titillation; the strip club scene — whether it’s the person dancing or the person watching — offers scope for both a bottoming out and a rising up; it is the perfect microcosm of “The American Dream”. It can be the person that’s made bank celebrating, the person that’s lost the house wallowing, and it can be the person at the pole with no hope or options anywhere else, or the person at the pole with full empowerment, agency, and income. So it works however it is framed. A story for everyone. A relatable scene whichever way it is written. And all without the true kink of pornography and/or anything darker/weirder. That’s me talking as if I’m a movie-marketer by the way. That’s that lens, I reckon.

Watching both Anora and The Last Showgirl made me feel like we’d at least come a long from American Mary, Showgirls, and Striptease.

The blue-collar Flashdance was, what? “The Rocky of films about strippers?” Maybe. I like blue-collar films. That is an important aspect of both Anora and The Last Showgirl too.

And now I realise I have no real way of ending this essay. There’s more to, er, come. For sure. This is absolutely just a tease.

So I’m sorry about that. And that.