Polyester
At a glance...
- Directed by John Waters
- Released in 1981
- Runtime 86 minutes
- Watched at home
- Final feelings: I had fun!
It's hard not to admire John Waters in how he makes movies. Even this being a more mainstream oriented film, Polyester still contains all the snark and sacrilege that are essential to the director's sense of style. Honestly, it's incredible that his career has spanned so much filth and earned so much vitriol that people can even describe this film as "mainstream oriented". I guess it's about "normal" people, though the beauty of what Waters does with his recurring cast is that he instantly colors that normalcy in a way that makes it obviously about the freaks (I say this with adoration).
I feel like I missed out because my copy of Polyester did not come with the odorama card and it seems like that would have been an essential part of the experience! Until I watched the bonus feature I actually thought the whole skit in the beginning about the cards was just like an elaborate long-form gag for the entire movie. We have been deprived of so much in our movies since then, imagine Silver Lining's Playbook with an odorama card! I want to sniff the football, and the dance mat, and other smells that I'm sure were present in the movie!
I have no idea what else to say about Polyester. I laughed a lot! It was a lot of fun! It was also a lot of wincing and grimacing as the movie just kept pouring on onto Francine. And it ends so abruptly, I was screaming and pretty bewildered about that. Just pure melodrama and farce, a classic John Waters film. Based on the content of the bonus features I understand that this is a film that is in conversation with a lot of older films from the 50s and 60s. I am just ignorant of a lot of cinema from that time period, so I will abstain from reckless free-association (I could stand to restrain myself like this more often). I will say lots of parts of this felt like a kind of suburban horror film, so embedded within the culture of the nuclear family that it doesn't even need scary music to be scary (yeah it's Halloween and here I am shoehorning in Divine as a house wife as being vaguely topical). Not sure there's anything else I really feel about this, though. I think it would be fun to watch again with friends.
Oh, no, I forgot. The Criterion Collection of this has the best bonus feature ever, which is a no smoking in the movie theater PSA featuring a young John Waters being hot and cool and hilariously coy, as he smokes a cigarette and tells you not to smoke.