Released in 1995, Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls was met by critics and audiences with near universal derision. You Don't Nomi traces the film's redemptive journey from notorious flop to cult classic, and maybe even masterpiece
Two 1990s North American pictures ensnare audience into the lurid business of strip clubs. Egoyan’s EXOTICA is a Toronto-bound mystery about a tax auditor’s unusual obsession with a stripper in a local club, whereas Verhoeven’s SHOWGIRLS is a succès de scandale, years later, it gets a revisionist assessment and a cult following after being mercilessly vilified and derided upon its initial release, which is detailed in Jeffrey McHale’s documentary YOU DON’T NOMI.
“Exotica” is the name of the club where Christina (Kirshner) works, owned by a broody Zoe (Khanjian), who inherits the club from her mother and has been successfully impregnated by Eric (Koteas), the club’s DJ and Christina’s jealous old flame (though how the arrangement is settled is lost in the shuffle). Among the habitués, tax auditor Francis Brown (Greenwood) habitually and exclusively shells out for private dances from a school-uniform-donning Christina (5$ per dance, what good ole days!), which rather gets Eric’s back up, whereupon he tricks Francis into being thrown out of the premises (a ruse really sounds facile to pull off).
After soliciting help from Thomas (McKellar), a pet shop owner who surreptitiously smuggles rare exotic birds from abroad, whose business he audits, Francis is intent on taking a radical measure to settle his grudge, viz. killing Eric with a pistol. But the plan goes astray as the truth behind Francis’s apparent nympholepsy - which is knowingly teased by his regular transaction with Tracey (a precociously luminous Polley), an adolescent girl who, thankfully, turns out to be his niece and only babysits for him (or more precisely, house-sits) - is a gapingly scarred bereavement.
Without giving away too many clues with its languidly paced narrative EXOTICA takes its pleasure in doling out key information in its own sweet time and Egoyan’s growing directorial prowess ensures that the film possesses an ensorcelling amenity - through its soothing, almost narcotizing ambience and Michael Danna’s exotic, intoxicating score - to keep audience invested in its mystery, which actually doesn’t weather too well. Francis’s wife and daughter are of a darker pigmentation, which makes their designated off-screen roles as an adulteress and a victim particularly tokenized and disingenuous. Since Christina is a a white gal, Francis’s transference loses its racial sensitivity , which only renders the script’s choices improvident and problematic.
The cast is unexceptional, Greenwood owns that quietly urbane charm which would ease him into that stolid WASP daddy type (he was not even 40 when cast in this, but his weary soul bares all his middle-aged sobriety) but cannot ignite the screen with his pathos release. Kirshner has some mystique to spare to paper over her thinly scripted role and Koteas’s rough-housing rakishness is always a gleaming treat to watch, but it is McKellar’s taciturn, hirsute and uranian Thomas, whose subplot seems to be lifted from an entirely different script, leaves audience want more, like how he operates his illicit business and is it just incredible his date-picking haunt is none other than an opera house? Not to mention his distinct racial predilection of guys he feels attracted to.
Ultimately, EXOTICA is about looking through a person’s normal surface and teasing out their darkest secrets (repeatedly prompted by the visual motif of two-sided mirrors, one character gazing into the other, oblivious one’s visage). However, in the aspect of the salacious stripteasing hijinks, Egoyan’s film is far too soft-core (even chaste) compared to the high-octane, wiggy abandon in SHOWGIRLS.
Verhoeven’s film centers around Nomi Malone (Berkley), a hellbent go-getter from obscure origin striving to be a headliner of Las Vegas’s topless dance revue. After being cozened out of her belongings right upon arrival, Nomi instantly strikes a sororal closeness with Molly (Ravera), a costume designer for the “Goddess” show at the Stardust casino, works as a showgirl and slowly fights her way to be the understudy of the show’s star Cristal Conners (Gershon), in order to achieve that she is not above putting out to Zack (MacLachlan), the casino’s fiendish entertainment director. Aftewards, simply pushing Cristal down the starts, so she can take her place in the show, that’s how it is done in Eszterhas’s million-dollar script.
It is par for the course that Nomi’s ascendancy is peppered with humiliations, rejections, propositions, and a plethora of nudity. What underscores the script’s contempt of the city’s vice and corrupt is that, save for Molly, everyone Nomi crosses her path with is shady and amoral on different levels. Her own corruption reaches the pinnacle when she behaves exactly like Cristal has done. Then a rude awakening shudders her into realizing the sordidness resided in this money-grabbing city and skipping town, but not before obtaining some poetic justice for the poor Molly, who is unwarrantedly thrown into a heinous case of sexual violence just to facilitate the contrived plot development. The script’s lack of thoughtfulness is not helped by her Afro-American provenance.
Quite a lot of flaks take aims at Berkley’s sassy, harsh and all-out interpretation of Nomi, who acts as if she is a patient of borderline personality disorder, which is, in fact, totally defensible when her concealed backstory is dredged up by Zack in order to blackmail her into compliance. Nomi is a fire-breather who desires a fresh start, wears her heart on her sleeve, and instinctively repels any improper proposition without any consideration of its cost. An admirable quality that sets her apart from other homespun overachievers, no one can take advantage of Nomi unless it is of her own volition. Berkley acts like a blunt instrument but there is more than enough va-va-voom, moxie and élan in her to knock audience dead, and when she dances, she is corybantic! It should’ve been a star-making role for her, yet, the reality is a cruel sexist joke.
Gershon also doesn’t wing it, Cristal’s sapphic limerence over Nomi blows an unashamed whiff of a more-than-friend-or-foe complexity and complicity that is exceedingly fascinating to watch. There is even no bad blood after Nomi’s underhanded usurpation, a modern and unexpectedly touching update on the female peer rivalry which is scrutinized most exquisitely in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ALL ABOUT EVE (1950). Gerson takes no prisoners in her alluring effusion of lesbian hankering, if that is also too much for audience in 1995 to be communal with.
SHOWGIRLS also finds Verhoeven in his most unstrained style in terms of the spectacular scenography and choreography of the showpieces, the sleek, slithering camera mobility and the laughably astonishing sex scene between Nomi and Zack in the pool, whose deliberate, unsexy fakery further goes against what the film is initially hyped about, it doesn’t pander for the lurid fantasy of straight males, albeit it is from the same team who dishes up BASIC INSTINCT (1992).
YOU DON’T NOMI charts SHOWGIRLS’s journey from a total commercial and critic flop to a reassessed cult classic with considerable conviction. Without resorting to interviews and talking heads (an approach seems quite puzzling because it is of great interest for audience to know how the original crew feels about the film’s renaissance), McHale’s documentary fills the screen with footage of Verhoeven’s other movies to reconcile with its essayist narration.
From SHOWGIRLS’s wayward attention to chips and fingernails, to a pivotal lunch sequence where Nomi and Crystal get chummy through Dog Chow and how the scenes’s composition establishes both as equals, YOU DON’T NOMI, a felicitous accompaniment to Verhoeven’s film, acknowledges its feminist standing and rapport. It also elicits great affirmation to see the film’s legacy continues by inspiring Showgirls musical and how that helps people, especially the queer ones, find resonance, strength and a droll outlet of positive expression. (Nomi’s rite-of-passage isn’t that different from a spurned, disowned queer person trying to start anew in a place no one knows them and leave the tormenting past buried underground.)
SHOWGIRLS’s awful luck is largely due to its unthinking temerity to challenge a predominantly puritanical audience, not because it is a Razzie-worthy stinker. It also leaves a bitter taste to see nearly three decades later, it is Berkley who has taken the brunt of its repercussions, whose hindered career never gets a second chance, while Verhoeven can still brandish his auteur flourish in the Continent, keep making provocative films and reinstate his cachet.
referential entries: Egoyan’s FAMILY VIEWING (1987, 7.2/10), CHLOE (2009, 6.9/10); Verhoeven’s BENEDETTA (2021, 7.2/10), ELLE (2016, 8.0/10).
《猫》？外行的东西。汤姆·霍珀在遭遇《猫》的失败后，也许还在舔自己的伤口，但在饱受诟病的灾难中，另一部电影却遥遥领先于他。保罗·范霍文1995年对拉斯维加斯习俗的研究，《艳舞女郎》不再是臭名昭著的炸弹，但她的死现在促使杰弗里·麦克海尔拍摄了活泼的纪录片《你不诺米》，这是一封持保留态度的情书。
电影丑闻是一个电影爱好者的术语——现在和当时的魅力在于，电影公司的制作为何会有如此多的错误，每一篇评论都是令人愉快的。
但是，就像这部电影被发现在路边哭泣一样，那些同样的失礼——明星伊丽莎白·伯克利饰演诺米·马龙的《火星救援》表演，作家乔·埃斯特拉斯令人瞠目的对话——让它重新成为一个休假营地，被粉丝们珍视。
尽管如此，电影的老化是不可预测的。麦克海尔认为，现在也许是时候认识到这部奇怪而独特的电影的缺陷和灵感的闪光了，它来自一个充满不安的文化时刻，在OJ辛普森审判和葆拉·琼斯对比尔·克林顿的性骚扰诉讼的背景下上映。
Two 1990s North American pictures ensnare audience into the lurid business of strip clubs. Egoyan’s EXOTICA is a Toronto-bound mystery about a tax auditor’s unusual obsession with a stripper in a local club, whereas Verhoeven’s SHOWGIRLS is a succès de scandale, years later, it gets a revisionist assessment and a cult following after being mercilessly vilified and derided upon its initial release, which is detailed in Jeffrey McHale’s documentary YOU DON’T NOMI.
“Exotica” is the name of the club where Christina (Kirshner) works, owned by a broody Zoe (Khanjian), who inherits the club from her mother and has been successfully impregnated by Eric (Koteas), the club’s DJ and Christina’s jealous old flame (though how the arrangement is settled is lost in the shuffle). Among the habitués, tax auditor Francis Brown (Greenwood) habitually and exclusively shells out for private dances from a school-uniform-donning Christina (5$ per dance, what good ole days!), which rather gets Eric’s back up, whereupon he tricks Francis into being thrown out of the premises (a ruse really sounds facile to pull off).
After soliciting help from Thomas (McKellar), a pet shop owner who surreptitiously smuggles rare exotic birds from abroad, whose business he audits, Francis is intent on taking a radical measure to settle his grudge, viz. killing Eric with a pistol. But the plan goes astray as the truth behind Francis’s apparent nympholepsy - which is knowingly teased by his regular transaction with Tracey (a precociously luminous Polley), an adolescent girl who, thankfully, turns out to be his niece and only babysits for him (or more precisely, house-sits) - is a gapingly scarred bereavement.
Without giving away too many clues with its languidly paced narrative EXOTICA takes its pleasure in doling out key information in its own sweet time and Egoyan’s growing directorial prowess ensures that the film possesses an ensorcelling amenity - through its soothing, almost narcotizing ambience and Michael Danna’s exotic, intoxicating score - to keep audience invested in its mystery, which actually doesn’t weather too well. Francis’s wife and daughter are of a darker pigmentation, which makes their designated off-screen roles as an adulteress and a victim particularly tokenized and disingenuous. Since Christina is a a white gal, Francis’s transference loses its racial sensitivity , which only renders the script’s choices improvident and problematic.
The cast is unexceptional, Greenwood owns that quietly urbane charm which would ease him into that stolid WASP daddy type (he was not even 40 when cast in this, but his weary soul bares all his middle-aged sobriety) but cannot ignite the screen with his pathos release. Kirshner has some mystique to spare to paper over her thinly scripted role and Koteas’s rough-housing rakishness is always a gleaming treat to watch, but it is McKellar’s taciturn, hirsute and uranian Thomas, whose subplot seems to be lifted from an entirely different script, leaves audience want more, like how he operates his illicit business and is it just incredible his date-picking haunt is none other than an opera house? Not to mention his distinct racial predilection of guys he feels attracted to.
Ultimately, EXOTICA is about looking through a person’s normal surface and teasing out their darkest secrets (repeatedly prompted by the visual motif of two-sided mirrors, one character gazing into the other, oblivious one’s visage). However, in the aspect of the salacious stripteasing hijinks, Egoyan’s film is far too soft-core (even chaste) compared to the high-octane, wiggy abandon in SHOWGIRLS.
Verhoeven’s film centers around Nomi Malone (Berkley), a hellbent go-getter from obscure origin striving to be a headliner of Las Vegas’s topless dance revue. After being cozened out of her belongings right upon arrival, Nomi instantly strikes a sororal closeness with Molly (Ravera), a costume designer for the “Goddess” show at the Stardust casino, works as a showgirl and slowly fights her way to be the understudy of the show’s star Cristal Conners (Gershon), in order to achieve that she is not above putting out to Zack (MacLachlan), the casino’s fiendish entertainment director. Aftewards, simply pushing Cristal down the starts, so she can take her place in the show, that’s how it is done in Eszterhas’s million-dollar script.
It is par for the course that Nomi’s ascendancy is peppered with humiliations, rejections, propositions, and a plethora of nudity. What underscores the script’s contempt of the city’s vice and corrupt is that, save for Molly, everyone Nomi crosses her path with is shady and amoral on different levels. Her own corruption reaches the pinnacle when she behaves exactly like Cristal has done. Then a rude awakening shudders her into realizing the sordidness resided in this money-grabbing city and skipping town, but not before obtaining some poetic justice for the poor Molly, who is unwarrantedly thrown into a heinous case of sexual violence just to facilitate the contrived plot development. The script’s lack of thoughtfulness is not helped by her Afro-American provenance.
Quite a lot of flaks take aims at Berkley’s sassy, harsh and all-out interpretation of Nomi, who acts as if she is a patient of borderline personality disorder, which is, in fact, totally defensible when her concealed backstory is dredged up by Zack in order to blackmail her into compliance. Nomi is a fire-breather who desires a fresh start, wears her heart on her sleeve, and instinctively repels any improper proposition without any consideration of its cost. An admirable quality that sets her apart from other homespun overachievers, no one can take advantage of Nomi unless it is of her own volition. Berkley acts like a blunt instrument but there is more than enough va-va-voom, moxie and élan in her to knock audience dead, and when she dances, she is corybantic! It should’ve been a star-making role for her, yet, the reality is a cruel sexist joke.
Gershon also doesn’t wing it, Cristal’s sapphic limerence over Nomi blows an unashamed whiff of a more-than-friend-or-foe complexity and complicity that is exceedingly fascinating to watch. There is even no bad blood after Nomi’s underhanded usurpation, a modern and unexpectedly touching update on the female peer rivalry which is scrutinized most exquisitely in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s ALL ABOUT EVE (1950). Gerson takes no prisoners in her alluring effusion of lesbian hankering, if that is also too much for audience in 1995 to be communal with.
SHOWGIRLS also finds Verhoeven in his most unstrained style in terms of the spectacular scenography and choreography of the showpieces, the sleek, slithering camera mobility and the laughably astonishing sex scene between Nomi and Zack in the pool, whose deliberate, unsexy fakery further goes against what the film is initially hyped about, it doesn’t pander for the lurid fantasy of straight males, albeit it is from the same team who dishes up BASIC INSTINCT (1992).
YOU DON’T NOMI charts SHOWGIRLS’s journey from a total commercial and critic flop to a reassessed cult classic with considerable conviction. Without resorting to interviews and talking heads (an approach seems quite puzzling because it is of great interest for audience to know how the original crew feels about the film’s renaissance), McHale’s documentary fills the screen with footage of Verhoeven’s other movies to reconcile with its essayist narration.
From SHOWGIRLS’s wayward attention to chips and fingernails, to a pivotal lunch sequence where Nomi and Crystal get chummy through Dog Chow and how the scenes’s composition establishes both as equals, YOU DON’T NOMI, a felicitous accompaniment to Verhoeven’s film, acknowledges its feminist standing and rapport. It also elicits great affirmation to see the film’s legacy continues by inspiring Showgirls musical and how that helps people, especially the queer ones, find resonance, strength and a droll outlet of positive expression. (Nomi’s rite-of-passage isn’t that different from a spurned, disowned queer person trying to start anew in a place no one knows them and leave the tormenting past buried underground.)
SHOWGIRLS’s awful luck is largely due to its unthinking temerity to challenge a predominantly puritanical audience, not because it is a Razzie-worthy stinker. It also leaves a bitter taste to see nearly three decades later, it is Berkley who has taken the brunt of its repercussions, whose hindered career never gets a second chance, while Verhoeven can still brandish his auteur flourish in the Continent, keep making provocative films and reinstate his cachet.
referential entries: Egoyan’s FAMILY VIEWING (1987, 7.2/10), CHLOE (2009, 6.9/10); Verhoeven’s BENEDETTA (2021, 7.2/10), ELLE (2016, 8.0/10).