Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Desperate Living (1977)

Director: John Waters

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Revelling in the travesty of carnal excess, Desperate Living transforms the standard elements of fairytale into a pastiche of dominant sexual mores. The wicked queen is an omnivorous barracuda-mother with a predilection for leather boys, who devours her empire's sub-lumpen populace with an appetite that is tempered only by perverse sadism. Her princess daughter, trapped in the heterosexual pursuit of a Love Story, is finally saved by a rebellious uprising of lesbian transsexual heroines who bring about the collapse of the maternal dictatorship. Single-mindedly tracing the limits where hedonism becomes revulsion, this is a celebration of the flesh, a revindication of marginalised sexualities, of desire as artifice, which is a lot less misogynist than the tasteful aestheticism of 'natural' sexuality in softcore porn.

Author: CPa 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: John Waters

Producer: John Waters

Cast: Liz Renay, Mink Stole, Susan Lowe, Edith Massey, Mary Vivian Pearce, Jean Hill full cast

Genre(s): Comedy

Duration: 91 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.