Divine in John Waters' FEMALE TROUBLE (1974)

Tonight on Sick Sad World...

Few things are as wild as seeing the Warner Brothers logo before the start of this movie. If they can do it for this and it's part of Criterion, they can do it for The Devils. Also, a much better Cruella movie than we got, that's a given (would Disney have anything close to someone like the iconic Aunt Ida in one of their giant franchise IPs? I think not!)

"If they're smart, they're Queer - and if they're stupid, they're straight!"

Female Trouble is a 97 minute epic satirical scorcher of a treatise on how not just to smash the Patriarchal Hetero Capitalist bullshit American machine, but how to sick Divine on it, preferably with a chair. Waters is rapturously in tune with one of the truths of life or trying to live in a relentlessly hopelessly state, that the status quo being taken down several thousand pegs is a moral imperative.

And yet for all the rigorous critique of bastard men and brutal moms and dads and other authority figures and those who want or are in the Fine Life, the warped but all too appealing ideals of Beauty and glamour, from those absent Christmas cha-chas to that event halfway through the film, it's all so staggering. And apparently the liquid eyeliner was real.. holy shit.

The insanity and violence just keeps mounting - and what else is Waters supposed to do, slow down? You can't stop a car when the engine is a cavalcade of filthy humans overloaded with psychological turmoil, bruised egos, and good evidence for why dicks should've been outlawed ages ago.

As a film, it's better shot than Pink Flamingos, though it's never missing the gritty, practically stolen run-and-gun sheen of all of the early Waters movies (this time with more locked-down shots were Peranio's lavishly decrepit sets can shine). It's at times so funny it hurt (Mink Stole as Taffy, or at least that gold dress, should be in the Smithsonian), yet rancor and high voltage melodrama is on cue every fifteen or so minutes in the script. 

That is, I should qualify, until it gets to that finale where Dawn goes on stage and it goes into a whole other level. And did I mention that as a movie written for Divine she takes it for all its worth and then goes over the line into another level of reality?

This is all to say this is really really good. If you got to do a "villain" origin story, don't kid the audience. Waters implicates us in ways that the filmmakers doing the secretly safe "Origin" stories of today don't get to (at best they might be fun if not confrontational ala Birds of Prey, and at worst you get....Joker and again Cruella) - what it lacks in budget or polish it makes up in honesty about how, deep down, so many of us are creeps, or hollow hypocrites (re that courtroom scene). Or are straight and boring. 

Anyway, Female Trouble is not always easy to watch, but it's endlessly compelling all-American exploitation.