Directed by:
Paul VerhoevenScreenplay:
Joe EszterhasCinematography:
Jost VacanoComposer:
David A. StewartCast:
Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan, Gina Gershon, Glenn Plummer, Robert Davi, Alan Rachins, Gina Ravera, Lin Tucci, Greg Travis, Al Ruscio, Patrick Bristow (more)Plots(1)
Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) has what it takes to make it as a Las Vegas showgirl what she doesn't have is a way in. To survive, she accepts the only job available: lap dancing at a seedy club. And when she meets Cristal (Gina Gershon), Vegas'reigning showgirl, Nomi wants everything she has including her boyfriend (Kyle MacLachlan). And as Nomi dives deeper into the world she so desperately desires, a rivalry between the two women heats up. The battle for the spotlight becomes so fiercely competitive that it drives Nomi to desperate lengths and devious heights for fame in Sin City. (official distributor synopsis)
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Reviews (6)
Paul Verhoeven is too good of a director to ruin essentially any film, but I wonder if the reason he chose this one wasn't just the vision of nudity. It almost seems that way because the screenplay is an incredible bit of banality that surprises you with nothing. Just with the sex scenes. The women here are nice to look at, the story not so much.
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Paul Verhoeven and his failure on every conceivable front. Tedious, plotless, poorly acted, unintentionally ridiculous for most of its running time, and frighteningly uninteresting. The only thing that makes it watchable are a couple of scenes that smack of the good old controversial Verhoeven.
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Contextually, I might suggest a comparison between Showgirls and Verhoeven's third Dutch film, Katie Tippel. Take how much it shares with it the whole concept of a young, beautiful, rebellious, and brash girl who breaks through to the highest ranks in a corrupt and unbreakably caste-ridden city, especially because of how readily she is able to abandon any ethical and moral values. I might also suggest the uncomfortable comparison that Katie Tippel is a film that was originally intended to provide an understanding of the rise of socialist movements in late 19th century Holland, whereas Showgirls tells essentially the same story only set in the present day, with not so much as a shadow of the development of socialist movements in sight, so the film doesn't actually offer a way out of the marasmus depicted. But I don't quite want to do that because it might come off as me defending Showgirls in some context. And at the same time, I think it's quite possibly Verhoeven's best film. The production design has incredible drive, the characters are almost constantly in motion, and yet the individual shots are very long. The one-shot scenes transitioning from dialogue to dancing or weaving between dozens of extras in backstage dressing rooms with millions of light and reflective sources are often far more elaborately choreographed than the chorus dances themselves, but they don't show it at all. During the dance scenes, the camera is almost static (except for Nomi’s breathtaking first performance, which is shot in a way familiar to anyone who has ever been on stage in front of a full house) yet becomes more dynamic with editing. At the same time, it has a minimum of shots purely for aesthetic effect, rather they convey several pieces of information at once. ___ I am aware of the discomfort that Showgirls must have caused in artistic and critical circles in its day, because it describes the entire world of show business as an unalterable patriarchal rape-cult jungle that cannot be conquered and in which you can only succeed by conforming to it. It must have been uncomfortably familiar to the emeritus cultural establishment of the time to watch everyone well-dressed at a party dancing to smooth jazz while a brutal gang rape takes place one floor up, with nowhere to turn. The most charmingly amoral scene in the film, then, is the one where the protagonist gains confidence through the recognition from her former pimp, an otherwise macho rapist who auditions his dancers based on whether they will suck his cock. ___ When you watch Showgirls, you see the formal qualities of the film (you can complain about the acting, but show me the good acting in any of Verhoeven's films with the honorable exceptions of Sharon Stone, Kurtwood Smith, and Jennifer Jason Leigh), you watch the panic that ensued after the film, and you are retroactively aware of how the showbiz backdrop worked in the 1990s. You realize that here Verhoeven and Eszterhas hit on certain public secrets with such emphasis that the discomfort America had to deal with in this film had to be reeled in. ____As for the acting, Berkley (for whom Showgirls practically ended an acting career that hadn't even begun yet) is not a bad actress, as can be seen in some crucial scenes, but her inexperience makes her unable to quite cope with Verhoeven's direction of his actors, where he gives the actors the required performances by performing them himself using exaggerated hand gestures. It compares very well to other acting performances in his films, especially from his Dutch period. What is of course unquestionable is what an excellent dancer she is, and once she’s supposed to express herself in that way the film picks up incredibly. Personally, I prefer dance movies with less skilled dancers more than dance movies where a snotty Nicole Kidman is stepping on her coattails pretending to be a posh prostitute. _____ Nowadays Showgirls is starting to get rehabilitated by the public and the critics, which only proves the unrivalled hypocrisy of Western pop culture, which is unable to contextualize actual works unless it starts analyzing them years after the film has become socially harmless, however much it has decimated the careers of most of those involved in the meantime.
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One star for the cool Kyle MacLachlan and the second for the shag in the swimming pool.
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Given the name of the director involved in this project, it is quite difficult to evaluate the film objectively. The plus points are the sexy Elizabeth Berkley and the excellently choreographed dance scenes, which are the film’s main attractions, aside from the many beautiful women. The plot is very weak, but that can be expected considering the topic. Overall, however, it is another strong, explosive and raucous film. Or what we are used to with Verhoeven.
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