Shelly Gardner won’t be anyone’s sex kitten.
The entertainer played by Pamela Anderson in Gia Coppola’s gauzy drama The Last Showgirl sees herself as merely a dancer with rhinestones and feathers in a historic (but closing) Las Vegas burlesque. In a humiliating audition for another lascivious Las Vegas revue, the 57-year-old character, a buxom blond dreamer, stands onstage before a sleazy producer (Jason Schwartzman) who cuts her performance short.
“You were obviously hired at the Razzle Dazzle because you were beautiful and young a long time ago,” he tells her. “But I mean, let’s be honest. You were hired because you were sexy, and you were young. I don’t know how to help you if … you don’t understand that’s not what you’re selling anymore, baby. Next.”
Shelly is one of many maturing female film protagonists this Oscar season combating the pressures of growing older in a career that overvalues youth and desirability. The Substance, The Last Showgirl, Babygirl, Nightbitch, Maria — all trade on themes of aging ungracefully. And, perhaps for the first time since Diane Lane hinted at what was possible in 2002’s smoldering Unfaithful, they form a corps of films unafraid to examine the psyches of women above a certain age assessing their diminishing worth in the sexual marketplace.
These films feel like a statement, even a movement, by mostly female filmmakers to tell highly personal stories that nonetheless are implicit social critiques, not just embracing the forbidden but humanizing what too often has been treated with comical disdain. They ask: How do we maintain power when our bodies — our most important resource, at least to those who hold power over us — are changing? And is it a defeat even to try?
It seems no fluke that these movies took shape after the rise of #MeToo, the movement crystallizing in their female filmmakers the need for such stories and perhaps even fostering in distributors and financiers, at least of the independent kind, a belief in their audience potential. The Golden Globes’ decision to nominate most of these films’ lead actresses demonstrates the accuracy of these instincts.
The movies of Babygirl Cinema are not afraid to critique their heroes. Nearly all examples in this post-Time’s Up lineup feature a fading dynamo staring down the barrel of (subjectively defined) irrelevance. They allowed themselves to be commodified when it suited them, for attention or security, and now resent that they no longer can draw from the well of their own charm. As their desirability dwindles, these women can go to extreme lengths to cling to their once-incandescent power.
For some, such a grip is ironically the only way to mentally or physically survive the sexism. Coralie Fargeat’s freaky body-horror fantasy The Substance has Demi Moore playing an ingenue turned aerobics star forced out of her job due to ageism. To take back control, she turns to a mysterious pharmaceutical that allows her to share her life with a younger and more gorgeous version of herself (Margaret Qualley), a flesh golem who squelchingly splits from her own blood and bone and increasingly renders Moore’s character the kind of decrepit meat-bag that society had already imagined for her.
Babygirl’s Romy (Nicole Kidman), on the other hand, uses pleasurable sex (as opposed to just sex appeal) to stave off a feared future reduction of status as she moves through middle age. In Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller, Kidman’s corporate boss lady explores her own subversion of power by engaging in taboo submissive sex with a much younger underling (Harris Dickinson).
A different kind of youth ache permeates The Last Showgirl as Shelly longs for a past when the casino sold out and she and her fellow dancers were flown around the world. And both Maria and Nightbitch highlight the struggles of women who also worry that they’ve passed their peak of artistry and itch for something that will bring it back.
Maria — in which Angelina Jolie stars as opera icon Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s downbeat biopic — shows a woman who was in fact forced into sex work by her mother during World War II, and the film painfully interrogates the scars that remain even at 53. In Nightbitch, director Marielle Heller illustrates through careful editing how the mere act of giving birth rendered Adams’ character persona non grata in her cosmopolitan art world. As the movie advances, she awkwardly grasps for her past identity while experiencing bizarre bodily phenomena that literalize the changes she underwent in becoming a mother.
Of course, formerly powerful women lashing out at a looming insignificance has at times been a staple of Hollywood cinema; the apotheosis is the delusional diva Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. But depicting the debate in purely sexual terms, with a messy and authentic female perspective and protagonist, is a newer phenomenon in contrast to the cuddly gentility of Harold and Maude‘s titular grand dame (Ruth Gordon), the campiness of Sylvia Miles in Midnight Cowboy and Lee Grant in Shampoo, or even Angela Bassett’s cleaner arc of empowerment in How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
It also would be difficult to miss that some of the current stars — Moore, Anderson, Jolie, Kidman — have been excoriated in the tabloids for sexual and marital scandals, and in these movies one can almost see a reckoning with, and repudiation of, this pop cultural mistreatment.
There is one film that serves as a counterpoint, representing the vigor these older characters strive to resurrect. Sean Baker’s Anora follows Ani (Mikey Madison), a 20-something stripper and occasional prostitute who uses her greatest resource — her body — as both political tool and economic weapon, wielding it to help secure a marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son. Ani sees it as forever sharp. The women of The Substance, Maria and Nightbitch might remind how it will one day be turned against her.
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
