Producers: Robert Schwartzman and Natalie Farrey   Director: Gia Coppola   Screenplay: Kate Gersten Cast: Pamela Anderson, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd and Jason Schwartzman   Distributor: Roadside Attractions

Grade: C

Pamela Anderson hasn’t entirely disappeared from view since her stint as iconic blonde bombshell C.J. Parker on “Baywatch” in the 1990s, but by placing her in a lead dramatic role Gia Coppola’s film aims to establish her bona fides as a serious actress of a certain age.  And though Anderson, usually dismissed as a celebrity of modest talent, gamely tries to meet the challenge, the flimsiness of Kate Gersten’s script, the raggedness of Coppola’s approach and her own thespian limitations sink the movie. 

Anderson plays Shelly Gardner, who’s been a member of the troupe in a Vegas hotel show called “Razzle Dazzle” since it started back in the eighties.  Though from what we see of it the show is threadbare and passé, she considers it a classic and, as a result of that delusion, is proud of her long association with it—for which, it will become clear, she sacrificed pretty much everything else. 

That’s why it comes as such a shock to her when laid-back, soft-spoken stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), invited to Shelly’s grubby place for dinner one night, tells her and the rest of her little “family”—younger dancers Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a onetime colleague now reduced to the role of cocktail waitress to the casino regulars—that the hotel owners are closing down the show in less than a month, replacing it with an expansion of a raunchy “circus”-style extravaganza that’s already taken over the stage a couple of nights each week.

Perhaps Mary-Anne and Jodie will be able to find other jobs—though as the former says after an audition, they’re looking for dancers much younger than she is—but for Shelly the news is a nearly incomprehensible disaster.  The film opens with her auditioning nervously before a director whose face is obscured in darkness, dodging queries about her age before beginning her desperate routine; the sequence is resumed late in the film, when the director (now revealed as Jason Schwartzman) abruptly cuts her off and, in response to her complaints, brutally informs her of the facts of professional life.    

To add to Shelly’s stress, a somber girl named Hannah (Billie Lourd) shows up.  Shelly is overjoyed at the news that Hannah’s graduating from college, but it’s only gradually revealed that the girl is her daughter, whom she’d sent to live with friends while she continued her so-called career.  Their reunion is bittersweet at best.  Given how solicitous Eddie is about Shelly, it will come as no surprise that, further on, he’s identified as having played a role in her life greater than just a friend.

So yes, this is another regurgitation of the hoary old chestnut about someone who’s over-the-hill in a profession trying desperately to hang on to fading glory nonetheless (think, on a more exalted level, of the boxer in “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” for example, or of Willy Loman—recent real-life examples from politics will spring to mind as well).  There’s always poignancy to such stories, and inevitably there’s a measure of that here. 

But Gersten’s feeble script does no one any favors.  It’s so thin that even as edited by Blair McClendon and Cam McLauchlin to under ninety minutes, the result is sluggish and repetitive, despite cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s attempt to energize things occasionally with some hectoring hand-held work.  Coppola’s direction is lackadaisical, allowing too many scenes to drag, and the threadbare look of the film (production design by Natalie Ziering, costumes by Jacqui Getty) emphasizes that this is a low-budget effort.  (It’s also a family one: Jason and producer Robert are both cousins of the director.)

Among the cast Bautista underplays so completely that he virtually disappears.  At the other extreme Curtis bulldozes her way through her scenes, with an impromptu pole dance that must be seen to be disbelieved.  (One has to give her credit for fearlessness, though.)  The lesser roles are adequately, if unimpressively, taken, though Shipka shows off how limber she is while previewing a dance routine backstage.

But of course attention will be focused on Anderson, and she’s clearly trying very hard.  But the girly giggling she does when trying to appear upbeat is annoying, and her attempt at solemn pensiveness, as in the frequent sequences of Shelly walking around alone and occasionally breaking out into dance moves, gets old, if you’ll pardon the phrase.  It’s only in the bifurcated audition scene with Schwartzman that she really hits the mark.

“The Last Showgirl” isn’t a disaster, like “Showgirls,” sort of its reverse, was.  It’s just an instantly forgettable take on a musty plot that gives Pamela Anderson the chance to take center stage, even if to less effect than some might have hoped.  You’ll be better off sticking with Ryan White’s well-received Netflix documentary about her.                        

Producers: Pascal Caucheteux, Jacques Audiard, Valérie Schermann, Anthony Vaccarello   Director: Jacques Audiard   Screenplay: Jacques Audiard, with the collaboration of Thomas Bidegain   Cast: Zoë Saldaña, Karla Sofia Gascón, Adriana Paz, Selina Gomez, Édgar Ramírez, Mark Ivanir and Eduardo Aladro   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: C

Audacity can be a fine thing, but sometimes trying too hard can be self-defeating.  That’s the case with Jacques Audiard’s musical melodrama, originally intended by him as an opera—in which form the story, inspired by a segment of Boris Razon’s 2018 novel “Écoute,” might have been more successful, even though it would definitely have been a soap opera.  As it is, the combination of drama, song-and-dance, farce, social commentary and tragedy in “Emilia Pérez” makes for a truly bizarre mélange.      

The initial focus is on Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer in Mexico City with an extraordinary facility for composing effective courtroom speeches for her boss (Eduardo Aladro) to deliver.  Naturally she’s frustrated that he takes credit for her work, and pained by the fact that her defense summations pervert justice by getting guilty people off, but it’s a job. 

Among the clients whose acquittal her skill is instrumental in winning is a media mogul accused of killing his wife, and drug cartel boss Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), recognizing who’s really responsible for the outcome, is so impressed that he summons Rita furtively to a meeting, where he promises her wealth and influence if she assists him in achieving a change in his life.

That change involves gender transition.  Manitas reveals that he’s been receiving hormone replacement treatment and enlists Rita to find a specialist willing to perform the surgery that will complete the process.  Manitas’ death will then be feigned, and Rita will arrange for Emilia Pérez, his female persona, to disappear.  Naturally Manitas will have to leave his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children behind, but they will be amply provided for, and protected, in Switzerland.

Confronted with an offer she can hardly refuse, Rita interviews possible surgeons, and finally Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir) in Tel Aviv is convinced to take charge.  The procedure is a success, Rita is amply rewarded and Emilia goes off, with plenty of money at her disposal, to make a new life for herself.

Four years later Rita finds herself at a sumptuous affair in London seated beside a woman who reveals herself as Emilia.  She’s decided that she cannot get along without her children and instructs Rita to inform Jessi that she’s a relative of Manitas who feels responsible for helping to raise the children back in Mexico.  Jessi ultimately agrees to the arrangement: it will afford her the opportunity to resume the affair with Gustavo Bon (Édgar Ramírez) she’d been having before Manitas’ death.  So Jessi and the children move into Emilia’s compound not knowing who she really is, and Rita reluctantly becomes an integral part of their lives.

Complexities now abound as Emilia, finally realizing the extent of the pain cartel violence has caused after her son indicates that he intuits who she is, decides to create a foundation called La Lucecita to assist grieving family members in discovering the fate of relatives who’ve gone missing.  In the course of its work Emilia meets Epifanía Flores (Adriana Paz), a woman searching for news of her husband, and the two become involved.  Meanwhile Jessi has taken up again with Bon, and when she announces that she and the children will leave with him, Emilia explodes, leading to a last act that includes kidnapping, a shoot-out, chases and death.

In presenting this strange brew, Audiard resorts to flamboyance on a major scale.  Though he uses some Mexican location work, he’s shot the film largely in Parisian studios, showcasing the elaborate production design of Emmanuelle Duplay and Anthony Vaccarello and the costumes of Virginie Montel, while he, cinematographer Paul Guilhaume and editor Juliette Welfling use myriad devices, from split screens to hazy transitions and dreamy dissolves, to energize what amounts to a filmed stage musical jazzed up to keep the adrenalin flowing.  Yet he’s also intent on wringing every ounce of emotion out of the scenario, so that the movie is a weepie as much as a thriller.

It would help, however, if the movie were particularly well-written, and the musical numbers better than mediocre.  Unfortunately, the dialogue is more pedestrian than inspired, the songs composed by Audiard and his collaborators Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais for the most part prosaic, and the choreography by Damien Jalet unimpressive.  All the cinematic razzmatazz in the world can’t make up for material that, apart from the supposedly daring premise and occasional verbal shocks, isn’t nearly as bold as it thinks it is.

To be sure, there’s compensation in the performances.  Paz is affecting and Gomez tries very hard, but Saldaña and Gascón are absolutely outstanding, with the latter in particular capturing the rage, sadness and determination of a person unable to jettison the past but resolved to seek redemption for the wrongs committed during it.

But even they cannot salvage a film that aims for an artsy edginess it never achieves.  “Emilia Pérez” is so anxious to startle us that it neglects simply to move us.