ON THESE ROADS WE CARRY NOTHING BUT LOVE by Kabir Deb
The idea of music comes from a travelling scenario in every culture or religion. Zarathustra had a song on his lips when he was travelling to a mountain to attain salvation. Prophet Dawud, a paigambar in Islam, landed on Earth by playing a harp followed a melodious verse. Mary Magdalene sang her love for Jesus before finding a place in his army of disciples. Krishna walked through the jungles of Gokul and lanes of Mathura by playing a flute to make everyone know that they are safe and happy. It has a lot to do with how the human mind seeks comfort in music. At the same time, how the latter originated by nesting in the hands of those who choose either to seek something new or to initiate what Newton says in his First Law of Motion: an object will remain at rest or continue moving with a constant velocity unless an external force acts upon it. The external force herein is always going to be the emotion associated with roads. It bridges the gap between the old and the new; regularity and irregularity; boredom and intriguing. Music is just a good symptom.
Every other emotion that we grow around and inside us is on a journey. Sometimes the movement allows us to settle down. To make us watch ourselves without nudging our conscience. Sometimes their attachment bothers us since the external world is always going to put weight on our shoulders. We cannot silence what is outside. However, we can control what burns inside us irrespective of their importance. Films on roads and journeys are made to let us have a look at life from an ideal and pragmatic lens, depending on the intention of the storyteller. Windowpanes of buses, the paddling of cycles, a walk through a garden of yellow tulips, making out under the torrential rain and feeding on the steam of a gorgeous companion – all of them initiate the process of buffering our whimsical thoughts. These stories allow us to come out of our own body and to accept the characters as surrogates. They mother or father us, and surprisingly, we let them hold us even in moments of hatred and agony. While watching a film, we build a road to reach the characters and, on the way, we take our friends, foes and fortune to satiate ourselves by making them watch our favorite moments. It is a road on which we may expose our true feelings. A place that is safe and unsafe, dull and important.
In the 1975 Wim Wenders film, Wrong Move, music metamorphoses into literature. In the film, the latter stems out to cut the fabric of emotions of a broken writer named Wilhelm played by Rudiger Vogler. The trauma of anyone who is born right after a war is something that can bring out a demon and ready to surrender himself before anyone who is prepared to slaughter. The writer after leaving his home and family finds a home in two street performers of Hamburg, attracted by the freedom they have to pursue their passion. Passion cannot be kept as a separate entity. It is deeply associated with finance. Wilhelm is not there for finance but the desire in him grows for the strangers who cross his life during his journey to the various streets of this unknown city. Roads do set us free but they also have the capability of possessing us through what it offers – like freedom, a carefree attitude and the courage to be anything we want to be.
The writer’s attitude has the shadow of hippie music that also protests against dependency and any imprisoned thought. During the journey, the epicenter of Wilhelm’s desire is located in the realm of exploration. Even when the sexual tension between the two street performers and Wilhelm reaches its zenith, the latter establishes distance since the road for him must end with a satisfaction that has to be an internal one.
Wenders takes us on a quest that is realistic, heartbreaking, and yet the quest must do justice to the road. In addition, this particular road is made by the writer to gather courage to document what he observes without sugarcoating. A pitch-dark road exposed before the naked sun. The light that escalates its temperature also keeps the small pieces of coal together. Only when water flows over its body, they are forced to separate from their own companions.
In the film, the characters around Wilhelm have the property of both the sun and water. They are either breaking his belief or putting their effort in stitching him quietly to help him live his desires. The culture and society of Germany during the release of the film used to be more rigid than the discipline and freedom of the present time. Wrong Move did justice to its name by taking a wrong route to reach the correct destination. It breaks the fourth wall of filmmaking and approaches the society around them by following a convergent process to address a divergent medium.
It was back in 2019 that Blu-ray released its new version of the David Trueba directed Spanish movie, Living is Easy with Eyes Closed (Vivir es facil con los ojos cerrados). In our lifetime, we have travelled hard to reach where we are right now, and we are still fighting hard to sail more. In this film, Antonio, a schoolteacher and a follower of The Beatles suddenly takes the road to meet John Lennon. As travelers, we take companions with us, but what matters is how the wavelength of our mind and their thoughts blend. Antonio finds Belen and Juanjo who are on the verge of escaping from their dysfunctional, conservative and unorganized families.
When we are on the road to be somewhere, we are drawn to people in pain since wounds and scars liberate us to find our better versions. Lennon, in this film, is a metaphor of a destination that inspires us to grow and evolve. During the journey, the trio encourage themselves to build a better life when they go back to live their own lives. On the road, everyone we meet is a known one. The story of a road is always about how the footprints have separate shapes but we call them legs and not something else. Sanity stays within us but like every other sane person; we strip ourselves to feel the anatomy of existence. The film also shows how in every age most issues have a similar kind of story – what differs is their narration.
During a journey, we become kinder towards our companions since kindness is the easiest emotion we can offer to those who were strangers moments ago. In the film, Antonio, Juano, Belen and others are strangers to each other, but what does not fade is the compassion they have for each other. We are all storytellers and a part of many stories. It is our nature to leave imprints on the lives we touch, and David Trueba wisely shows what Lennon wrote in his 1967 song All You Need is Love:
“There is nowhere you can be that isn’t where you are meant to be; it’s easy.”
Films are much more than visuals. They are stories that multiple people tell with a single heart. If we strive towards engaging with every heart, we are going to miss that one heart. Therefore, when a film is about a road, a journey or a quest, we have to step into their shoes to push our limits. It is a warm hug in motion that is felt only with bare emotions, to see how they still hold our tears even when we have wiped them off our face. In this journey, there is no baggage. We only have to watch the road that is always thirsty for us and like a true lover, surrender to it, unconditionally. We can bleed on the road, we might get our heart broken, but it is always going to take us where we want to be.
Candice Louisa Daquin reviews The Last Showgirl
There are two ways you can view this limited-release arthouse film. It’s possible to see The Last Showgirl as an illustrated venogram of the lives of women who work in certain looks-age-based professions. It could be argued the origin sin of vanity leads invariably to ultimate rejection. However, there is another way of viewing Gia Coppola’s (granddaughter of director Francis Ford Coppola) The Last Showgirl. As a film that neither offers nor summarizes conclusions. But offers the viewer an honest view of a point in time in the lives of several half-broken-by-life women. By taking the second interpretation, we are able to put aside any knee-jerk judgements that are long thrown at actresses, dancers, models (etc.) who lament their ageing beauty and the loss of opportunity and recognition as vain-glorious. We have as a society berated those betrayed women as naïve child-women who should have known the consequences of choosing (an appearance-based job) instead, placing judgement on their heads, with a highly gendered double-standard, which is rarely applied to men and when it is, the extremes are greater.
The Last Showgirl possesses many attributes that many films do not. It is without guile. It is dispassionate in its documentary-style intimacy, and the dialogue is of less importance than the feeling you take away, conveyed to you, through a series of seemingly unrelated vignettes, wrapping around the film’s central theme. If you write the central theme down, it doesn’t sound particularly special: Middle-aged woman, Shelly Gardner (Anderson) finally loses job in looks-based performance world of Las Vegas, working as a showgirl in Le Razzle Dazzle, a semi-nude classical Vegas showgirl gig. Alongside other disintegrating women, she comes to realize the choices she made in life, led to this seeming dead end. It could also be argued; there is less social/moral value to this kind of story, than say, other adversities that are more extreme. I would argue whilst literally speaking true, all walks of life contain value and its not for us to moralize over the slice of life we choose to examine.
However, if you describe the movie this way, you are missing it’s considered purpose. On a political level, to show the double-standard of gender. How men are ‘allowed’ to age, without as many penalties, regardless of the kinds of jobs they do. Women who are hired for their looks, are fired for their (seeming) loss of looks. Ageism applies far more to women than men. Sexuality is becoming increasingly pornographic. Those women who are attractive enough to land glamor jobs in the performance world, age like everyone else, but have no recourse and only closed doors, and this happens much earlier than any of us would think. Relate this to a wider scope. Women who are not attractive at any age, women who work totally different jobs, they’re all subject to varying extents, to a redundancy and an invisibility. Far earlier than men are.
Ultimately then; ageing. Which affects absolutely everyone. The negative-effects of ageing in a society that refuses to admit we’re all going to die. Negative effects for women who are not considered desirable or worth looking at, after a certain age. The protagonist of this film, played unerringly by Pamela Anderson in her role of a life time, is a Monroe voiced former beauty, with the age of Las Vegas on her face if not her body. Dancing among girls younger than her daughter, she is told the long-standing last glamor-based traditional Vegas show-girl show, Le Razzle Dazzle, is closing. Gone the feather boas and yards of diaphanous crepe chin. Make way for more overt, sexualized shows. We see Anderson rage and fight against the inevitability, half-mother to the younger show girls, half child-woman herself.
She is a mother too, but relinquished or lost custody. The father is her immediate boss, and whilst gentle giant, he has clearly no desire to be responsible or involved. Her best friend Annette, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in probably her most powerful role to date (and that’s challenging, given how many fantastic parts she’s had in her renaissance) is further down the road than Anderson and the stark contrast is both harrowing and wholly unpretentious. Both actresses shed any self-consciousness, to play a ‘warts and all’ role, that strips them bare and reveals the horrors of ageing in plain sight. By ageing I do not imply ageing need be negative, but in certain settings, there is absolutely no forgiveness and that is what we are presented with here. At the same time, there is a real beauty to both characters and whilst a majority of men may disagree, there are epochs of beauty including beyond the confines; where the love these two women have for one another, and their delight in private moments, shines radiantly.
Jamie Lee Curtis lost her role at Le Razzle Dazzle years before, and her descent downward is evidenced by her unfulfilling and underappreciated job as cocktail waitress. Sidelined by the younger more attractive waitresses, she struts around in a ridiculous, ill-fitting outfit, one-dollar-bills humiliatingly stuffed in her faux perma-tanned cleavage by drunk old men. The most crushing scene being where she dances to Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart, alone on an impromptu stage. The ruin and devastation of her circumstances, set against her obvious love of performance and dancing. This is also true of Anderson who gives up her child because she loves her job and cannot afford to pay for her child to be cared for, receiving no support from the father.
The child, now young-adult, played by Billie Lourd, comes into Anderson’s life intermittently, to remind her she was not there for her, without understanding this wasn’t a selfish life choice; she didn’t earn enough to provide a good life for her child, so she gave her to a family who could. One could make the argument this was convenient, but she also has a father who goes unjudged for his absence in her life. Anderson loves her child, but is in some ways, a child herself, who couldn’t give her stability and yet, deeply cared for her child, had her limitations. That tragedy isn’t the tragedy of a negligent mother, so much as a society that leaves women with children very little choices. Critic Shelia O’Malley said of The Last Showgirl: “(Anderson’s) performance is an inadvertent indictment of an industry who pumped her up while simultaneously de-valuing her, barely considering her an “actress” at all.” The intimacy of the film alongside its unfiltered, naturalistic approach, allows Anderson to climb out of the label-industry and shine without artifice.
The comradeship between the women working at Le Razzle Dazzle, especially the varied ages of those women, really highlights their arcs of existence, and how a parody of them tells nothing; whereas this film by Gia Coppola and written by Kate Gersten (The screenplay was adapted by Gersten from her own play, Body of Work, which she based on her visits to the Jubilee! show shortly before its closure in 2016), is gentle in its revealing of truths, through the quiet presence of the camera, rather than a directorial impulse to have the key characters speak and justify themselves self-consciously. It has been said of The Last Showgirl, that the acting was stellar and the filming moving, but the script was lacking. I would disagree. This film doesn’t feel scripted and that is surely the purpose. To let the audience reach conclusion without being guided, so much as presented with this series of moments.
It can be frustrating, when we are used to being spoon-fed on the high-conscious star-power acting you see with actors like Nicole Kidman or Meryl Streep. But that’s exactly the brilliance of The Last Showgirl, this isn’t a Streep or Kidman film, this is a film without wattage. It’s on the back burner but it’s still going to come to the boil. A true art-house film, made by women, for women, featuring women, The Last Showgirl leaves any notions of Pamela Anderson’s vapid days in Baywatch behind. She’s come into her own and given half the chance, rises to the challenge, proving herself to be a compelling and endearing natural actress, with many nods to her own personal experiences bolstering the story. Jamie Lee Curtis is probably my favorite American actress of now. She’s just getting better and better. If you think this can’t be a feminist movie, consider the arc of many of our lives and how those who have been under the spotlight and seen it direct-hand, are often the very people suited to portray it in a film like this.
I couldn’t help thinking of leotard-clad Curtis in Perfect, in this film’s solo dance scene, and of course, we know Anderson was typecast in a swimsuit. It’s time we stopped berating women for having boob-jobs and start supporting one another, especially films for women by women, featuring women, which I’ve said for years, is the only way real women’s lives will be depicted. For too long we’ve let the likes of Woody Allen, speak for us, and it’s not good enough.
It was said of Pedro Almodovar’s latest film; that the director really ‘knows women’ and yet, regardless, this remains, another man directing women. Actresses have the power to get behind projects like The Last Showgirl and stop themselves being canceled by a youth-obsessed, patriarchal culture. Let’s get writing and directing. I couldn’t help but notice a 60s-something man sitting in the back row, obviously lured by Pamela Anderson into watching the film. He left shaking his head, I could read his bubble thoughts, where was the flawless Anderson in her swimsuit? I realized something; many men may not be capable of appreciating women of a certain age; it may just not be possible for them. We can’t change this; we shouldn’t fight amongst ourselves because of it. We should ignore it and keep ourselves visible, because their inability to not see us as we age, doesn’t have to be our own.
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