director/screenwriter/producer
John Waters
cinematographer
John Waters
music
Bob Harvey
editor
Charles Roggero
John Waters
cast
Divine (Dawn Davenport)
David Lochary (Donald Dasher)
Mary Vivian Pearce (Donna Dasher)
Mink Stole (Taffy Davenport)
Edith Massey (Ida Nelson)
Cookie Mueller (Concetta)
Susan Walsh (Chicklette)
Michael Potter (Gator)
mpaa rating: NC-17
running
time: 97m
u.s.
release: 10/4/74
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other john
waters films
reviewed on this website:
- cecil
b. demented
- a
dirty shame
- pecker
- serial
mom
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How does one follow up a legendary
affront to decency? In John Waters' case, he moved on. Female
Trouble, which Waters made two years after his notorious
Pink Flamingos, is significantly less gross and considerably
more advanced in its satire. The movie's theme is "Crime
is beauty," which Waters half believes and half doesn't.
Waters' incomparable star Divine returns as Dawn Davenport, a
surly teenager who runs away from home after her parents fail
to give her cha-cha boots for Christmas. "I hate you! I
hate this house! I hate Christmas!!" she screams, and we're
off and running. Female Trouble follows Dawn from juvenile
delinquency to early motherhood to a dubious career in the arts,
so it's an epic of sorts.
Dawn is raped by a random slob
(also played by Divine in boy mode; Divine shares with Anne Carlisle
in Liquid Sky the unique distinction of playing a sex
scene opposite himself) and gives birth to Taffy, a shriekingly
bratty girl played as a teen by Mink Stole, who gets the movie's
most-quoted line: "I wouldn't suck your lousy dick if I
was suffocating and there was oxygen in your balls!" This
line, by the way, is directed to Dawn's shabby husband Gator
(Michael Potter), Taffy's stepdad, a hairdresser who doesn't
even have enough style to be gay. Gator's Aunt Ida (the incomparable
Edith Massey) bemoans his sexual squareness: "Honey, I wish
you was queer.... Heterosexuality is a sick and boring lifestyle."
How Ida winds up in a giant
birdcage with a hook for a hand is best left for the adventurous
viewer to discover. This is early John Waters, so a lot of Female
Trouble still plays like shock for shock's sake -- for instance,
a jarring close-up of Gator's genitalia (There's
Something About Mary, with its similar frank-and-beans
shot, owes more than a little to Waters) -- but its ideas
are more provocative than its imagery. Dawn falls in with the
upper-crust Donald and Donna Dasher (David Lochary and Mary Vivian
Pierce), who run the beauty salon Dawn frequents. They love her
outlaw trashiness and encourage her to commit crimes while they
snap photos of her.
Even back then, Waters seemed
to be tweaking the uptown samplers of his underground films,
the art-house denizens who considered it a status symbol simply
to have watched Pink Flamingos without walking out. Terrence
Rafferty wrote about The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her
Lover (another film that probably wasn't possible without
the trails Waters blazed), "To sit through it with an unshockable
air is to demonstrate, irrefutably, one's liberal cojones."
Rafferty could have been referring to Waters' early movies, which
were often taken as must-see events among the hipsters. Pink
Flamingos was a midnight-movie hit, and Waters' absolutely
typical response was to bite the hand that fed him. The Dashers
are meant to be taken as arrogant exploiters (and exclusionary
snobs who reject potential customers for not having sufficiently
fabulous and/or tacky jobs). They keep Dawn in a state of denial,
even after Ida hurls acid in Dawn's face, reducing it to a mask
of stucco-looking scar tissue. Everyone around Dawn convinces
her that she's more beautiful than ever, but we get the sense
that they're not telling her this to comfort her but to keep
her a viable cash cow.
At heart, Female Trouble
-- right down to its title (a better one than Waters' original
idea, Rotten Face, Rotten Mind) -- is Waters' skanky rewrite
of the Douglas Sirk women's weepies of the '50s (a subgenre he
would return to with Polyester). Nothing ever goes right
for Dawn; she's taken advantage of wherever she turns. And of
course everyone abandons her when she's on trial for murder,
for which she gets the electric chair (a prop that remains in
Waters' Baltimore home). Dawn's head has been so thoroughly twisted
by now that she greets capital punishment as the ultimate stage
in her outlaw career. She goes out bald and scarred and grinning,
and I think Waters relishes that final shot of her as much as
he did the infamous doggie-doo shot in Pink Flamingos.
The movie carries a dedication to Manson family member Charles
"Tex" Watson, but I'd say Waters is more taken with
the idea of murderers, and the morbidly fascinated media
that circle around them, than with actual murderers, who tend
to be boring in real life aside from their lurid deeds. Female
Trouble is an ode to bad-girl behavior and a sly slap at
those who would profit from it, and it gives the mighty Divine
a chance to take a character from relatively innocent girlhood
to fortyish insanity. What other director would have given Divine,
or anyone else in this film, an opportunity like that?
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