REVIEW: John Waters’s Female Trouble
Email This ArticleJohn Waters’s Female Trouble is an allegory about filmmakers, I suspect. Donald and Donna are the proprietors of a beauty salon. They interview and hand select the most hideous of potential clients. When they come across Dawn Davenport, they decide to take the horrors of her life and build her up in a catalysmic orgy of what is sometimes known as “gay delusion.” When they decide to showcase Dawn at a theatre, her act does not go over well with the audience. On trial, they are called to cross examination, where both Donna and Donald deny everything. This struck me as a close semblance to film-makers and artists who try to wash their history clean of flops.
I came to this realization when John Waters himself, plays the defending lawyer for Dawn. In effect, he is defending a piece of art work to be it’s glorious self, no matter how hideous.
Of course, the movie would be a gem just on the hilarious dialogue between Gator and Ida, a mother who begs her son to be gay, and warns of the dire consequences of becoming heterosexual: “I worry that you’ll work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries. The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life!” A scene many of my straight friends and I replay and fall over onto the floor laughing till it hurts.
A must for anyone who brought their entire family to the delightful Broadway play of Hairspray and felt they wanted to get better acquainted with Waters’s previous work.