A poor man's Sean Baker movie

Although director Gia Coppola comes from a family lineage of a very different sort of filmmaking -- several different sorts of filmmaking within one family, I should say, this one probably most resembling her aunt Sofia -- the person most responsible for the look and feel of The Last Showgirl may be the man who just won all the Oscars this past year. (When The Last Showgirl also might have been up for an Oscar, if the campaign to get Pamela Anderson nominated had had legs.)

That's right, I'm not sure if we would have The Last Showgirl without Sean Baker.

As you would know if you've followed Baker's career -- or read this post -- Baker loves him some movies about sex workers. I don't know if you would actually call what Anderson's Shelly does for her career "sex work," but she's a Vegas showgirl whose breasts are bared during her Rockettes-like act. She's selling sex if not actually giving it, and it becomes clear that any equivalent replacement career she'd have, if her show were to be shut down (which it is in the course of this narrative), would be selling sex a lot more.

Then there's the fact that reference is made to the fact that she could be (but isn't) one of those showgirls who hustles on the side -- in other words, is available for "bonus activities" for a particular sort of fan who waits at the stage door after the show. She actually does have a possible interest in one such fan, never seen on screen, which is why the subject comes up at all.

It might feel even more like a Baker film -- particularly Baker's last film, the one that won all the Oscars -- because Anora also spends time in Las Vegas, the setting for Coppola's film. Of course, since the movies were released within only a few months of each other, that's just a coincidence, because of course it is.

Though the thing that really cemented the Baker connection for me, after I'd already made the initial connection with the sex work theme, was the way it's shot. I was reminded a bit of Baker's The Florida Project, which has a lot of external shots of characters in an around hotels and establishments on busy commercial or industrial thoroughfares. They share a dreamy indie sensibility that Baker did not pioneer, but may have helped bring to greater prominence. 

If we are taking about The Last Showgirl relative to Anora specifically, I have a comparison between the two films that might surprise you. I definitely think Anora is the superior film, but not by the margin you might expect. And it all comes down to how Baker and Coppola have chosen to develop, or not develop, their main character.

Whether he meant to or not, I feel like Baker left his titular character as a bit of a cypher. We spend a lot of time with Anora -- she's in practically every scene -- but all that time has not allowed us to get to know her any better. I kind of think that was an intentional choice by Baker, not an oversight, but that doesn't mean it worked any better for me. The distance I felt from Anora prevented me from getting on board with the movie to the same extent other people did.

With Shelly, screenwriter Kate Gersten has done a much better job of rounding out her history, and has not had to hit us over the head to do it. That also means that Gersten and Coppola's film is more conventional in some ways, since it really is Screenwriting 101 to give your main character a back story, past traumas that come back to haunt her, an estranged daughter, that sort of thing. We get all that for Shelly, and Anderson's performance -- which I initially wasn't sure about -- really helps sell it. 

If it makes me a basic bitch for preferring this approach to Baker's intentional deviation from it, well then, a basic bitch I am.