Pamela Anderson’s star shines anew! The 90s icon in “The Last Showgirl” returns to screens with the role of a lifetime – and one with echoes of her own biography. The film, directed by Gia Coppola, won the Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, while a career-best performance earned Anderson her first Golden Globe nomination. Accompanying her are BAFTA nominee for her bravura performance as a waitress Jamie Lee Curtis (Oscar for “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Dave Bautista (“Dune”, “Guardians of the Galaxy” series), who this time does not pretend to be a superhero, and Kiernan Shipka (“Longlegs”, “Mad Men” series). With a sensitivity and attention worthy of Sean Baker, Gia Coppola tells the moving story of a woman who refuses to let herself be sidelined.

Shelley (Anderson) performs in a revue in Las Vegas. The work is her great passion and a way to realise herself, for it she sacrificed her family years ago. Today, she learns that the show she gave everything to is going off the stage. But even though the 57-year-old dancer hears from everywhere that her time is up, she has no intention of leaving the stage. In a city that beckons like a mirage, only to be brutally woken from her sleep, she fights for her dreams and to regain her relationship with her daughter. A mature dancer with no classical training and a mother who has never been perfect – Shelly is a full-blooded heroine who is not spared by life, but who proves that the end can be a new beginning. A tribute to Anderson and her story is the Golden Globe-nominated Miley Cyrus song “Beautiful That Way”, written for the film.

Intimate, stretched between illusion and reality, the luxurious facade and the austere life that goes on behind its scenes, “The Last Showgirl” is also a unique portrait of the city. Usually shown at night, lit up with neon lights like an amusement park, Las Vegas in Gia Coppola’s film is filmed during the day on grainy 16mm film to reveal what lies behind the glitz and magic. The unusual feeling of being ‘locked in an aquarium’ that can accompany being in the entertainment capital is captured by the special anamorphic lenses used. Las Vegas in Coppola’s film is a place without the concealing lapse of make-up, whose glamour inevitably passes away – and which shares with Shelley an uncertain but hopeful future.