Directed by:
John WatersScreenplay:
John WatersCinematography:
John WatersCast:
Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Mink Stole, Edith Massey, Cookie Mueller, Henry Bederski, George Stover, Susan Lowe, Susan WalshPlots(1)
Glamour has never been more grotesque than in Female Trouble, which injects the Hollywood melodrama with anarchic decadence. Divine, director John Waters’ larger-than-life muse, engulfs the screen with charisma as Dawn Davenport—who progresses from a teenage nightmare hell-bent on getting cha-cha heels for Christmas to a fame monster whose egomaniacal impulses land her in the electric chair—in the ultimate expression of the film’s lurid mantra, “Crime is beauty.” Shot in Baltimore on 16 mm, with a cast drawn from Waters’ beloved troupe of regulars, the Dreamlanders (including Mink Stole, David Lochary, Mary Vivian Pearce, Edith Massey, and Cookie Mueller), this film, the director’s favorite of his work with Divine, comes to life through the tinsel-toned vision of production designer Vincent Peranio and costume designer/makeup artist Van Smith. An endlessly quotable fan favorite, Female Trouble offers up perverse pleasures that never fail to satisfy. (Criterion)
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Female Trouble is the highlight not only of the early underground phase of Waters’s career, but actually of his entire filmography. In the film, Waters takes on a variety of classic women’s roles found in Hollywood popcorn flicks, e.g. rebellious schoolgirls, exemplary mothers taking care of their families and their own beauty, suffering heroines of heart-breaking melodramas about women who have gone astray. We could almost say that he cut out his own version of Sullivan’s Travels. However, his aggregate of classical Hollywood genres and conservative ideals is not self-adoringly affected by them, but it rather enhances them with a Waters’s typically campy queer trash-chic optics. He deforms and disfigures them into a boisterously hedonistic form, while revealing the atrociousness and absurdity of the original concepts through caustic jokes. Waters’s gang perversely appropriates and delightfully desecrates the degenerate phenomena of beauty ideals and the myth of stardom, from which they build their own monument to infectiously likable ugliness, tastelessness and perverse hedonism. Standing dominantly at its peak is the phenomenal Divine. Though she is spectacular and magnificent in every film, this one gives her the role of her life. And not just because Female Trouble allowed her a drag/straight dual role and a scene in which she has sex with herself on a urine-soaked mattress in a gutter.
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