52 Films Directed By Women Vol 1: 13. THE DRESSMAKER (Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse)
Nominally, The
Dressmaker, adapted from Rosalie Ham’s novel, is an Australian western,
with sewing machines instead of guns. It is set in the small Australian town of
Dungawat in 1951, which sees the unexpected homecoming of Myrtle ‘Tilly’
Dunnage (Kate Winslet), who as a young girl was sent away after being accused
of killing a classmate. Tilly wants to find out the truth about her crime, but
first has to reacquaint herself with her mother, ‘mad’ Molly (a movie-stealing
Judy Davis, complete with greyed-out front tooth) who appears not to recognise
her and is sadly missing her possum. Tilly shows off her wares, high fashion
dresses in the Parisian catwalk style. They seem incongruous in the Australian
outback - a visual joke that I never got tired of. She trades dresses for information and uses
her stylist skills and some marijuana-infused brownies to earn good will,
whilst at the same time facing down the cause of her exile. She also catches
the eye of a local farmer (Liam Hemsworth) who is the town’s star football
player.
The cast list offers a who’s who of 1980s and 1990s
Australian cinema and includes actors such as Julia Blake, Barry Otto and
Genevieve Picot. The small-town setting offers a microcosm of Australian
talent, the ones who never went away – with the exception of Davis, who had a
moderately successful Hollywood career. The
Dressmaker is also Winslet’s second film ‘Down Under’ after Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke. At one point, the film
threatens a trademark Winslet nude scene, but no – the full-figured actress is
seen in a strapless black dress.
About halfway through, Tilly’s successful showcasing of her
dressmaking is threatened by the appearance of another stylist, Una, who has
been hired to make a wedding dress. She has a poor sense of fashion. Tilly is
aided by the local policeman (Hugo Weaving), a cross-dresser in the tradition
of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of
the Desert and her mother, who gradually recovers her senses. But Tilly
can’t escape the feeling that she’s cursed.
The Dressmaker is
not just a feminist black comedy, with more blood than its (UK) ‘12A’ rating
suggests (‘moderate violence’ – pah). It has something to say about Australia’s
repositioning from a former British colony – the townsfolk use pounds,
shillings and pence – to an Asia Pacific power. It references Shakespeare (Macbeth) but also South Pacific and The Mikado.
The European influenced Tilly has a destructive impulse – a need to see the
small town rebuilt from scratch – but Pacific culture offers a means of
reinvention.
There is a point about 85 minutes in where the mystery is
resolved and there is the possibility of a happy ending. The narrative daringly
pushes on as Tilly faces her curse. The last part of the film has a high body
count. This makes for a much more
radical text than we expect. The last line refers to disposal of trash – it is
clinical but also scathing. There is real venom rather than the reconstitution
of a new status quo.
The humour makes the dark content easier to take, with
Davis’ Molly taking particular delight in being carried by Hemsworth’s
character and stealing his whiskey flask – she is a real live-wire during a
screening of Sunset Boulevard,
mocking William Holden’s ‘attraction’ to Gloria Swanson. The casting of an
English actress as the cultured outsider works really well, though playing the
detective figure, Winslet doesn’t have to display a huge range of emotions,
often deferring in scenes to Davis rather than giving as good as she gets. That
said, while Davis starred in My Brilliant
Career, Winslet undoubtedly has had one.
The early reviews of The
Dressmaker didn’t really get the film. It was interpreted as too quirky,
with a surfeit of incident in the final third. But it feels like a satisfying
whole. It has the swift, harsh sea change of emotion that you see in the best
Australian films, like Muriel’s Wedding. The
pay-off seems right. It is also a pleasure to see a film so thoroughly
inhabited. The townspeople seemed to have lives, something that is not always
evident in movies. The film suggests a variant of the British TV series Midsomer Murders that all but destroys
the format by the end.
Reviewed at Cineworld, Fulham Road, South Kensington, London, Saturday 21 November 2015, 20:30 screening.
Originally published on Bitlanders.com
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