POLYESTER, John Waters' sixth feature, a delirious if inordinately over-the-top parody of suburban decadence, has inchoately elevated him from the seedy underground to the sightline of mainstream audience, starring Divine as Francine Fishpaw, a housewife buffeted by hammer blows consecutively, from a two-timing husband Elmer (Samson), her snooty and acquisitive mother La Rue (White), to two defective adolescent children, the promiscuous Lu-Lu (Garlington) and the perverse Dexter (King), the latter of which fetishizes feet and is the notoriously "foot stomper" harrying Baltimore, until a dreamboat named Todd Tomorrow (Hunter), who can easily sweep her off her feet but his affection might be sham.
Waters' script touches on a comprehensive scope of societal issues, adultery, pornography, abortion, sex perversion, romantic deception, alcoholism and depression, you name it. But the reason why it can earn a cult following decades after its release is simply because the transgression of casting a drag queen as a honest-to-goodness woman (Divine's own overweight grotesquerie alone has been incessantly exploited as both laughing stock and stereotype-shattering manifesto) and then runs away with it, Divine is too histrionic by half in reveling in those traditional characteristics designated to a witless female victim but the resultant campy fun is inestimable, especially with the concerted team work of players from Waters' Dreamlanders stock company....
continue reading my review on my blog: cinema omnivore
Waters' script touches on a comprehensive scope of societal issues, adultery, pornography, abortion, sex perversion, romantic deception, alcoholism and depression, you name it. But the reason why it can earn a cult following decades after its release is simply because the transgression of casting a drag queen as a honest-to-goodness woman (Divine's own overweight grotesquerie alone has been incessantly exploited as both laughing stock and stereotype-shattering manifesto) and then runs away with it, Divine is too histrionic by half in reveling in those traditional characteristics designated to a witless female victim but the resultant campy fun is inestimable, especially with the concerted team work of players from Waters' Dreamlanders stock company....
continue reading my review on my blog: cinema omnivore