Film

Desperate Living (1977)

Director: John Waters

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.

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