Women Watching Women Watching Women

In movies like “The Last Showgirl,” a new kind of woman has emerged onscreen, our critic writes. That’s thanks to more of them being behind the camera, finally.

Movies contain a multitude of bodies in different sizes, colors and muscle tones, bodies that are trim, bulky, parched, surgically altered. Talking about them, though, especially women’s bodies, can be understandably fraught. For some observers, writing about them is unnecessary and objectifying, even if a lot of other people — politicians, activists, influencers, Supreme Court justices — can’t stop talking about them. “We’re always talking about the feminine condition and the role of women,” the filmmaker Agnès Varda once said. “But I want to talk about the woman’s body, about our bodies.” I want to talk about them, too.

That’s because some of the most memorable movies that I’ve seen lately are from female filmmakers who are also clearly thinking about women’s bodies and helping expand what kinds of women we are seeing onscreen. One such movie I keep returning to is Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” a recently released drama set on the frayed edges of Las Vegas. In a scene that keeps playing in my head, a cocktail waitress, Annette — played by a soulful Jamie Lee Curtis — climbs atop a small platform in the casino where she works and begins dancing. As slot machines ping around her, she slowly gyrates to the 1980s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Annette looks like she’s in her own world. She looks glorious.

Curtis, who’s 66, has said the scene shows the “degradation of women at the end of their lives,” adding, that “nobody cares.” Scarcely any casino patrons glance at Annette as she dances, true. But I did care, and I suspect I wasn’t alone. I get it, though; older women can feel invisible — I do. Yet here Curtis, who’s bathed in beautifully diffused light during the scene, the camera pointed up in seeming adulation, is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips into a squat, her thighs tense and strong. I adored watching Curtis play Annette, and I think Coppola wants us to love this character as much as she clearly does. That is also glorious.

“The Last Showgirl” touches on mothering, friendships, the commodification of beauty and the role that women play, willingly or not, in their own objectification. It explores how identity is partly created, sustained and jeopardized by the gaze of others, and what it means when women gaze — at others, at themselves — which puts the film in dialogue with recent movies like “Babygirl,” “Nightbitch” and “The Substance,” which received five Oscar nominations. The protagonist of “Showgirl” is Annette’s friend, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) a dancer whose revue is shuttering. Clouded with worry, Shelly — like Anderson, the character is 57 — is anxious about her future and sense of self. Who is she, after all, if no one looks at her?

Anderson likes to be makeup free; away from work, so does her character. Shelly loves being a showgirl — “feeling beautiful, that is powerful” — but when she puts on her costume, she’s cosplaying an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Onstage, she plays a fantasy. When she’s offstage, Shelly is a person with a life, everyday concerns and friends, mostly women, who look at one another with gazes that find common cause. Coppola sees the world of “The Last Showgirl” as a metaphor for the America dream, one in which commodified bodies come with expiration dates. It is also an emblem for women in film, who have long fought against their perceived disposability and continue to find common cause in female-driven work.