Taking the John Waters Route to Female Sexuality in Fucktoys

Courtesy of Trashtown Pictures LLC

Fucktoys. The title started as a joke, a riff on the term fuckboys, but humor was in short supply in writer/director and star Annapurna Sriram’s life when she started writing the script. “I was going through a breakup, my reps had dropped me, and I was in a very weird, dark place.” Her solution can be summed up as WWJWD: “What Would John Waters Do? What’s the punk angle here? How can I actually say something? I’m not going to pussyfoot around, and I’m just going to put myself out there.”

The title was definitely polarizing. “Some people were a bit, 'Fuck yeah, let’s go, this title is amazing,’ and then some people were like, 'Well, you have to change the title.’” It wasn’t just the support of boosters like producers Tim Petryni and Heather Buckley, but the doubters that made her double down on the title. “It became a point of censorship, and it became a point of reclaiming something we’re told is wrong, and we’re told we can’t do.” For her, while the title is “the most risqué part of the movie,” it’s also “a warrior cry. If you’re not down for this, don’t come. Get the fuck out. This is a female-led movie. This is our reclamation of our voice, our perspective, our agency, our gaze, and the title became part of that mission statement.”

It also represents her artistic sensibilities, which she called “kinky and smutty and a little slutty,” and her sense of humor, of the postcoital banal absurdity of “the limp dick on a thigh that’s just kind of ugly, and everyone’s kind of sticky.” That’s all expressed in Fucktoys: a little bit Voltaire’s Candide, a little bit Terry Southern’s Candy, a little bit Alice in Wonderland and a little bit the Fool’s Journey as Sriram’s character, young libertine and “endearing fuckup” AP, embarks on a horny, rambunctious escapade through late capitalism after taking terrible advice from a psychic. Sriram explained, “We have that little inside joke that Anora is the film that Sean Baker would make, and Fucktoys is the film that Anora would make.”

Photo by Jason Robinette

And, yes, there's that John Waters influence, which goes back to her childhood in Tennessee, borrowing random arthouse movies from the Nashville Public Library because the covers were cool. "My parents didn't really check," she said, "because if it came from the library it was presumed it was all fine. So, when I was in middle school, we rented Polyester and Pecker and Bad Taste and Cemetery Man and But I’m a Cheerleader."

However, she eventually realized that many films she liked came from white men talking about women’s sexuality. As an adult, she kept being offered parts as “the Iranian character who wears a headscarf, or the Muslim character who is going to have an arranged marriage.” None of those roles reflected her experience as a young artist in New York, “free, in my 20s, sowing my oats, partying, dancing in clubs, having this completely alternate experience. ... I felt like the day-to-day that I was living was more compelling than the scripts that I was reading.”

The greatest endorsement of her commitment to unrelenting honesty came from her friend and inspiration, Wallace Shawn. She said, “After he read my script, Wally was the only person to go, 'Are you OK?’”

Fucktoys

Narrative Feature Competition, World Premiere

Saturday 15, 6pm, Alamo South Lamar