A trashy American musical, an absurd cabaret, a techno oratorio of gender stereotypes: Marlène Saldana immerses herself in the unbridled mental universe of the heroine of Paul Verhoeven’s cult film to turn glitz and glitter into an antidote to violence and emptiness.
“How to survive in a world populated by scum?”, Jacques Rivette once wrote of Paul Verhoeven’s film. In 1995, the Dutch director filmed the grandeur and decadence of Las Vegas as a premonitory metaphor for an America that gorges itself on crass vulgarity and crushes people. The incandescent and obscene film shows without comment the fate of a young woman who has come to try her luck in the city of gambling and easy money. She accepts all kinds of humiliations and becomes a predator herself, ready to do anything to survive. Poorly received by critics and audiences alike on its release, it is now recognised as a monument of queer counter-culture, camp and pop expressionism; a cult film in which lightness, glitter and glitz describe the struggle of classes and sexes and relationships of domination and submission. Showgirls is a major film about gender, its violence and its metamorphoses.
