’s is a dreamy, melancholy portrait of a veteran Las Vegas dancer reeling from the news that her career has hit its expiration date. The movie is as gossamer-thin as the wings that the title character, Shelly — played by with an undiluted sense of heartbreak — keeps tearing on her stage costume. The story more often drifts than advances, favoring ambience over substance in a few too many wordless sequences observing Shelly wandering or dancing or just staring into the abyss in sun-blasted parking lots, on rooftops and streets, bathed in lens flare and the shimmering score of Andrew Wyatt.
After her promising 2013 feature debut and her sophomore stumble seven years later with , Coppola seems more in thrall than ever to the impressionistic style of Aunt Sofia. But the new film — written by Kate Gersten, a Coppola clan member by marriage — can’t compare to the piercing emotional intimacy of, say, , or , even if the raw character study at its center steadily builds poignancy. First seen rolling up for a dance audition in a jaunty cap whose crystal beading seems a calculated bid to draw attention away from her age, Shelly is a 30-year veteran of a spangly revue called , the last survivor on the Vegas Strip of a yesteryear entertainment quaintly described as a “tits and feathers show.
” But that steady job is about to be yanked out from under her as the performance goes the way of the dinosaur, to be replaced by a sexy burlesque circus. Even though she’s been shuff.
