Nouvelle drague

I Am Divine

Crit

Aware of the calendar all day, I was actually walking to the movie theater wondering how the historic date might fit with a documentary about a great big female impersonator notorious for eating dog doo on screen. Not that far a reach, as it turned out: a clip from an early John Waters film shows a very young Divine in an iconic pink pillbox hat (it's a b/w film, but we know what color it is), portraying a wife in the process of becoming a widow, scrambling out of an open limo and onto the trunk. Golly.

Waters tells us that Divine transgressed against the already transgressive drag culture. Well, yeah, but I guess I was looking to learn a little more. It's a perfectly OK film, worth seeing, but smaller than life, which is precisely what its subject was not.