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.

Sugar Cookies (1973) Starring Mary Woronov and Lynn Lowery

 

Like a prototype Vertigo remake (before De Palma gave it his old college try), only with a prototype Basic Instinct kind of icy (no pun intended) kick to it on a tenth of the budget of each. It's a story where a personal obsession leads this antiheroine Camila (Mary Woronov) to take a new woman who she is "casting" for an adult film, and the woman just happens to looks like the spitting image of her dead ex lover, a different adult star Alta, with Lynn Lowery as both the woman who dies in the first scene and this new woman, Julie Kent, who Camila befriends/beds/grooms for revenge. So, yeah, imagine if Scotty in Vertigo was not just shaping New Madeline into the Old Madeline, but getting her ready to enact revenge against Gavin Elster for fucking with him so bad.

Not an exact analogy, and ultimately there's a reason for that. Sugar Cookies lacks much of the moral and psychological ambiguity and the sheer weight of cinematic expression and grammar on the process of becoming infatuated and what that does to a person, which is what makes Vertigo the monumental or simply memorable film it still is - that Hitchcock could see through desire and idealized images while doing just that - and as far as the Basic Instinct comparison that comes down to really the lead being so Stone Cold Set in what she's about, though this film lacks the verve and humor that carried. Not that this doesn't try for humor, but arguably it comes from what I imagine was co writer Lloyd Kaufman finding the Gus character simply hilarious (and good God is it distracting how much that guy is like a young Jonah Hill teleported back in time, but digress).

If Sugar Cookies doesn't aim so high or achieve too much in the way of creating psychological depth between these two women, one who knows all and another who doesn't, then at least for one thing the filmmakers understand that there's this dominant-submissive angle that isn't expressed in sex so much (though they do get intimate, at least eventually) as it is in behavior and overall control, and the director cast Woronov, a force of nature who prior to this was largely one of the Factory Girls with Warhol, and Lynn Lowery, so well, in particular with a lot of trust put on the latter in a dual role as the heart of the film (in her debut) and allowed them the space to make these women emotionally complex and rich... to a degree.

One small example with Woronov comes to mind with how good she is here: there's a scene where Camila is getting Lowery into bed for a sort of role-play, naked (as she is for more or less half the film), and becomez shall we say very intimately familiar with her body via a small handgun, and the allusions of course to the former Alta, who Julie is now well aware of (at least on film and by reputation) leads to a brief struggle and fight to stop. Woronov does the whole "fine get out they were just blanks etc" thing, and then moves on the bed to make Julie guilty. One can say she is still manipulating her, but look at the pleasure and smiling Woronov is doing after all this, as if she knows this is all so silly (hey, they were just blanks). This is where we get some uncertainty in a good way about the character and it's driven by her performance; is she still playing her Instrument of Revenge, or is she getting emotionally closer to her in a genuine way? Or both? It's one of those times with an actor boosts the writing.

It is unadalterated sexploitation, and the Shannon performance is fairly one note (though he has a great look) as one of those master manipulative men of the adult film world - not that I can't believe men didn't exist like that then and still do, just that the actor plays it in a way that is icy but not on the same level as Woronov - and there's plenty of draggy time between the ladies in the middle where it feels like the script just said "They run around and go frolicking in a field" or some shit, and that one comic (barely a) subplot is nonsense. But there is something going on as far as a sordid, almost Neo-Noir tale of performative mindgames via a righteous Femme Fatale leading to the conclusion one can guess a mile away, and it shows that Lloyd Kaufman started out with something to say as a writer. If it falls short of what it reminds us of, it at least tried.