Jocelyn Moorhouse
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Connections, in both directions
Director Jocelyn Moorhouse includes a cinematic quotation from “Sunset Boulevard,” and “The Dressmaker” does have its noir side, a brooding sense of the past and a satirical vision of the present.
That scene, and a handful of others — like one in which Tilly and Teddy take Molly to see Sunset Boulevard, and she heckles and howls at the screen — are charming and clever enough to make you wish the movie were a bit less of a mess.
The funniest and most moving scenes involve the mother-daughter relationship (Judy Davis steals the show with comic pathos and many references to Gloria Swanston and Sunset Boulevard) and in the budding romance with hunky local boy Teddy (Liam Hemsworth), whose physical charms are fully dwelt upon in a delicious scene where Tilly measures him up in his underwear to make him a suit.
At one point, Tilly, Molly and Teddy attend a local showing of “Sunset Blvd.,” and the priceless sight of Molly talking back at the screen, cutting between Davis and Gloria Swanson, feels like a subliminal moment of exchange between one inimitable Hollywood grande dame and another.
The scenes between Winslet and Davis, especially a visit to local a moviehouse to see Sunset Blvd., almost make up for it.
As the haunting South Pacific standard “Bali Hai” plays on the radio, Winslet moves in on Hemsworth’s bare chest with her measuring tape and he whispers sweet nothings in her ear as she works.
Results are results, and there’s no harm in a bit of romantic idealism (represented by repeated spins of the South Pacific soundtrack album).
Hogan employs “Bali H’ai” from South Pacific as the movie’s theme—an inspired, theater queen, connection to the Australian cult filmWelcome to Woop Woop.
Much of “The Dressmaker,” which is based on a novel that Moorhouse and her filmmaker husband, P.J. Hogan (“Muriel’s Wedding”), adapted, has a fractured fable quality built on rubber-faced acting — save Winslet, shrewd enough to underplay as a contrast — and comic obviousness.
Director Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, A Thousand Acres) co-scripts with P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding), based on the fierce and fantastical novel by Rosalie Ham.
This cartoonish yet confrontational approach recalls the work of Moorhouse's husband P.J. Hogan, who collaborated with her on The Dressmaker's script (and whose own first feature, Muriel's Wedding, was set in the comparably horrid Australian town of Porpoise Spit).
Adapted by Moorhouse (returning to directing after an absence of 18 years) and her husband P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding), the film is set in the 1950s and stars Kate Winslet as Myrtle ‘Tilly’ Dunnage, who returns to her home town of Dungatar and announces, “I’m back, you bastards”, after a lengthy period studying dress-making in Paris.
In adapting Rosalie Ham’s debut novel, screenwriters P.J. Hogan (Muriel’s Wedding) and Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof) aren’t after the usual bloody release but rather what Moorhouse has described as a more “feminine” form of revenge.
Feeling like it belongs to that 1990s era of garish movies from Down Under, perhaps it’s no surprise the co-writer is her husband P.J. Hogan, the director of Aussie camp classic Muriel’s Wedding.
Her new one, “The Dressmaker,” is like some hellborn alloy of film noir, campy melodrama, “High Plains Drifter” and the Darwin Awards for people who die in moronic accidents.
Based on a novel by Rosalie Ham, “The Dressmaker” proceeds down a number of subsequent plot paths – some of which are farcically comical, one of which involves a shocking death – rejecting each before transforming into a woman’s version of the Eastwood revenge film “High Plains Drifter.”
Veteran DoP Don McAlpine (Moulin Rouge, My Brilliant Career) knows how to shoot a period film so that it looks both nostalgic and modern.
Unforgiven (1992)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
influenced The Dressmaker (2015)
Characters Plot Themes
Dungatar looks like an Aussie version of a spaghetti western bordertown, and Winslet rolls into it like a chiffon tornado – Moorhouse likened Tilly to "Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with a sewing machine”.
Described by director Jocelyn Moorhouse as “Unforgiven with a sewing machine”, Australian black comedy The Dressmaker (based on the debut novel by Rosalie Ham) is comfortably the weirdest revenge movie you’ll see all year.
“Unforgiven with a sewing machine” is how The Dressmaker was described early on in its life, and by the time this film’s hectic revenge-laden climax involving Macbeth, Gilbert and Sullivan and a red carpet comes to pass audiences will have likely already decided whether they are on board with its fashionably deranged hijinks or not.
The festival’s optimistic description of the movie as a hybrid of “Chocolat,” “Dogville,” and “Unforgiven” is a pretty good idea of what you’ll be getting into, but it’s not even close to as seamless as Tilly’s impeccable sewing skills.
Director Jacelyn Moorhouse has described The Dressmaker as “Unforgiven with a sewing machine.”
The husband-wife team of Jocelyn Moorhouse (“How to Make an American Quilt”) and P.J. Hogan (“My Best Friend’s Wedding”) spare no unpleasantness, and fail to find laughs in much of it.
Yes, there’s the usual Winslet sorrows except that The Dressmaker has a script by P.J. Hogan (My Best Friend’s Wedding) who writes another of his inimitable gay-friendly farces.
She glamorously revels in scandalizing the petty folks she’d left behind, a slightly overdone gaggle that includes the resident politico (Shane Bourne), the town schoolmarm (Kerry Fox, “Shallow Grave”), and a dowdy shopgirl (Sarah Snook).
The spaghetti western motif is especially strong, as Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage (Kate Winslet) returns to her dustbowl of a hometown – the fictional Dungatar – dressed to the nines in an elegant, figure hugging number that Winslet rocks just as Clint Eastwood did a poncho in A Fistful of Dollars.
“The Dressmaker” doesn’t so much change the pattern of this “Peyton Place” style story as render it ugly and humorless.
It is a buoyantly excessive feat of far-fetched camp that isn’t as good as its highly-stylized cinematic cousins of the early 1990s such as Strictly Ballroom, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, and Hogan’s own Muriel’s Wedding, yet which nonetheless has enough of a unique voice to work as a very Australian piece of crowd-pleasuring fluff.
The film could also be seen as the long-delayed feminist answer to Wake In Fright.
The film opens as a western, with Winslet’s dressmaker Tilly Dunnage arriving in lonely Dungatar, a Pale Rider sheriff here to clean up this godforsaken town, armed only with a Singer sewing machine.
The town still despises Tilly, and she them, but she is happy to take their money, and for a while, The Dressmaker feels a bit like Cold Comfort Farm, with the city girl comedically bringing elegant civilization to the middle of nowhere, all the ladies of the town prancing to the post office or the general store in glamorous and wildly impractical gowns.
It’s a strange cocktail — think Lasse Hallstrom’s Chocolat spiked with John Waters’ Serial Mom — and Moorhouse and writing partner P.J. Hogan (director of Confessions of a Shopaholic) find some pungent flavors amid the tropes, cliches and pastiche.
Hand in hand you have moments of classic Hollywood of old fashioned courting and romance; and moments later tragedy that feels like you’re strapped into a chair alone with Mads Mikkelsen’s Le Chiffre from “Casino Royale.”
Hogan’s best films to date are his transcendent Peter Pan (2003) and the globe-spanning farce Unconditional Love (2002) which was written by his wife Jocelyn Moorhouse.
Each scene is internally consistent, but they add up to something like a patchwork: sometimes director Jocelyn Moorhouse (A Thousand Acres) wrings certain emotions from the script she cowrote with P.J. Hogan (Mental), but it’s rarely the same emotion twice.
The adaptation of Rosalie Ham's 2000 novel is credited to Moorhouse and her husband, fellow director P. J. Hogan, and as with his last feature, 2012's Mental, the tone is wildly diverse and genres clash with spaghetti-western framing and melodramatic close-ups freely intertwined.
Penned by P.J. Hogan (“Muriel’s Wedding,” “Mental”) it’s hard to accurately describe the absolutely bonkers tone of the movie.