John Waters
Trash and midnight movies par excellence: an outrage to decency and intelligence, where bad taste is at the highest levels. A different film, that will become famous for its excessive and legendary aesthetics. A grotesque comedy made with very little money, offered together with a simple but efficient narrative structure. John Waters, pioneer of underground cinema, impatient and insightful elf, esthete and professor of “Cinema and Subcultures” at the European Graduate School, in 1972 made his little trash jewel: Pink Flamingos. It brings into play and confuses pieces of different public ideals, where dismay is mixed with the photo novel and the hard with the grotesque.
““Murder relieves tension””
The transvestite Divine (aka Babs Johnoson) proud official holder of the well-deserved title of "Most Disgusting Person in the World", together with her family, also particularly devoted to bad taste, spends her days in a broken-down mobile house surrounded by fake hens and pink flamingos. Primacy that the spouses Marble, drug dealers dedicated to every kind of wickedness, will try to overcome. Two jealous perverts whose main activity is to kidnap young women, keep them prisoner and have them domesticated and then sell newborns to wealthy lesbian couples. But the whole thing is not limited to a mere jumble of free crap, in fact thanks to Waters' ill humor and his ability to portray decidedly 'original' characters, the film is a brilliant comedy of visual excesses, brilliant dialogues and a healthy taste for the provocation to the limits of a post-modern decoration. A film for which you must be predisposed to abandon any defense position if you want to enjoy the fun proposed on the screen, otherwise the risk is to suffer vulgarity. 36 years later it can be defined without exaggerating the Scult par excellence in which Waters opens the cabinets full of skeletons, and exhibits the unbalanced habit of his unconscious.
Pink Flamingos
director JOHN WATERS
year 1972
director of photography JOHN WATERS
cast DIVINE, DAVID LOCHARY and MARY VIVIANE PEARCE
words SILVIA GAIA MARCELLI
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