Female Trouble (1974) 15 minutes into our re-watch of this film, one of writer-director John Waters' notorious, infamous, deliberately trashy epics (along with 'Pink Flamingos'), we realized applying any kind of usual reviewing structure was futile.
We'd face a task equivalent to reviewing a film imported from another planet, populated with aliens whose lives, aspirations, behavior and morality fell far, far beyond human comprehension.....
Waters stock company of....uh.....'actors', a collection of the oddest outcasts and oddballs from his native, beloved Baltimore performed like no other company of actors anyone had ever seen.
Deliberately posed to face the camera directly, they'd loudly announce their dialogue to each other in declarative sentences, establishing Waters' signature directing style. There's no way on earth anyone could mistake a Waters film as anybody's else's but Waters.
90 minutes sounds like a terminally long time to watch a film performed this way....(it's like sitting through an X-rated play performed by an amateur community theater group)........but whenever your eyes might start rolling upward in impatience, Waters and his cast will spring some outrageous, disgusting and hilarious moment to keep you riveted. That you can depend on.
What struck us most about "Female Trouble" was not its dauntless efforts to shock us.....(in the shock-a-rama arena, its already been eclipsed by countless other movies that came after it). What did catch our immediate interest was the prescient, scary and all too accurate depiction of a fame whore.......an individual with no discernible talent or ability except an obsessive, near psychotic hunger for attention.....whose singular ambition is only to stand in the spotlight of the public eye for no reason whatsoever.
In the rise and fall of the constantly enraged and obese Dawn Davenport (female impersonator and Waters' favorite muse Divine), the director presents an individual who'll let nothing stand in her way to command the audience she so desperately craves.
We won't even begin to detail Dawn's journey to attain her ultimate goal of worldwide notoriety......which includes mutilations and multiple murders. By the time she assembles a paying audience to watch her jump on a trampoline, eat raw fish and madly convulse as if afflicted with seizures, her need to become 'famous for being famous' cannot not be quenched in any rational way.
That's why Dawn's final, spectacular gesture, which elevates her to the pinnacle she quested for all her miserable life, seems inevitable.
And in Dawn, we could easily see the future rise of today's 'reality stars'.....the preening, posing array of public figures who've achieved their fame though......well, nothing much except their constant preening, posing and perpetual addiction to publicity. And their performing abilities aren't much far removed from the John Waters company of amateur misfits who populate "Female Trouble"......they're just a little more attractive.
We didn't have to spend a whole lot of time connecting the dots between Dawn Davenport and the Kardashians, the bachelorettes of 'The Bachelor', the odious Kate Gosselin and the near biblical plague of Tik-Tok-Instagram 'influencers'
That peek into the future is what now gives "Female Trouble" an extra sharp, satirical kick....and made coming back to it a 3 star (***) fascinating watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment