POINTS: 4
Once upon a time, Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse made a more than promising debut film, Proof (1991), the story of a blind photographer whose life is looked after by his housekeeper until a third party enters the scenario: a young restaurant worker eventually becomes his best friend. Each character deals with their own trust issues while they try —and often fail— to connect emotionally. Even with its minor flaws, Proof was somewhat of a small gem. And it starred a very young and slim Russell Crowe, alongside Hugo Weaving (one of the queens in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert)
Then Moorhouse made two US outings that despite her best intentions and the good performances of the talented actresses featured, ended up being nothing to write home about: How to Make an American Quilt (1995), with Ellen Burstyn, Anne Bancroft, Wynona Ryder, and Jean Simmons; and A Thousand Acres (1997), with Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange.
Now, after an 18-year hiatus, she’s made The Dressmaker, based on the novel by Rosalie Ham, set in Australia, and starring Kate Winslet and Judy Davis. And what a lame comeback it is. Sure enough, Moorhouse has a knack for getting renowned performers for her films, but unfortunately she can’t pull off a decent movie with them. Oddly enough, Proof had no big names and was made on a shoestring budget.
The Dressmaker tells the story of Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage (Winslet), a ‘50s glamorous haute couture dressmaker who returns to Dungatar, her outback home town in Australia. She was kicked off from home when she was 10 for allegedly killing a classmate who constantly bullied her. Tilly apparently suffers from amnesia, so she can’t remember how the kid actually died, yet she feels she didn’t murder him and so for some unknown reason, she’d been framed. So she now wants to exact fierce revenge upon those who harmed her.
She also wants to have a long-awaited reunion with her crazy old mom, Molly (Judy Davis), who’s got all sort of problems, beginning with the fact she doesn’t remember Tilly is her daughter— or so she says.
With her sewing machine and haute couture style she learned in Paris, Tilly walks around town dressed as a star and gets the local women to be her clients by promising them she’ll make them look as gorgeous and classy as they come. Which she actually does. And yet not everybody will be pleased with the presence of this knock out of a woman who used to be a neglected child of a slutty mother.
As The Dressmaker unfolds, it runs into all sorts of narrative problems, beginning with an ill-conceived genre-crossbreeding that turns it, time and again, into a sit-com, then a romantic comedy, then a drama, then back to romance only to be followed by screwball comedy, that is until the crime story takes over, and every now and then the grotesque rules. In the third act, expect drama and more drama, even with a realistic tint that had been absent from almost the entire film. Imagine all of this at once. Yes, it’s not a pretty sight.
It’s not that such tonal shifts can’t ever be successful for there are some directors who are actually pretty good pulling such a difficult trick. Trouble is that Moorhouse is surely not one of them. For in The Dressmaker the tonal shifts are too blunt and too abrupt. Even each genre in itself is unnecessarily overstated to the point of being caricaturesque. To toy with clichés can be fun when it’s done as a parody, but the way clichés are used here make you feel you’re watching a parody of a parody. And I’m sure this is not intended.
Plus there are many inconsistencies in the very logic of the film m, e.g. how does being a haute couture dressmaker in a God-forgotten rural town fit into a plan of revenge? Because you never see that transforming the women results into anything significant at all for the revenge. Lilly could’ve simply gone back and executed her revenge without even having made a single new dress. And there are quite a few inconsistencies like this one along the entire film —like why is the love story between Lilly and the local hunk (played by the always stunning Liam Hallstrom) even necessary in the story at all?
Halfway into the film, there are already so many half-cooked subplots that you wonder how the script is going to intertwine them seamlessly and eventually tie them up together in a gripping manner. Well, it never does any of the two things. So by the end, you have a mess of a film that never reached its peak.
By the way, the performances of Kate Winslet and Judy Davis are just fine for the most part —even if Davis is over the top too often. But they never truly excel. Blame it on Moorhouse, not on the actresses.
Production notes:
The Dressmaker (Australia, 2015). Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse. Written by Jocelyn Moorhouse, P.J. Hogan (based on the novel by Rosalie Ham). With Kate Winslet, Judy Davis, Liam Hemsworth, Hugo Weaving, Julia Blake, Shane Bourne, Kerry Fox, Rebecca Gibney, Caroline Goodall. Director of photography: Donald M. McAlpine. Production designer: Roger Ford. Editor: Jill Bilcock. Costume designer: Marion Boyce. Production companies: Apollo Media, Film Art Media, Screen Australia. Running times: 118 minutes
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