The Dressmaker (2015)
Directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse
In 1950s Australia, beautiful, talented dressmaker Tilly returns to her tiny hometown to right wrongs from her past. As she tries to reconcile with her mother, she starts to fall in love while transforming the fashion of the town.
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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.
Ms. Moorhouse (whose previous films include “Proof” and “How to Make an American Quilt” ) and her costume and production designers make the most of the period setting, and it’s fun to watch good actors play dress-up, especially Mr. Weaving, whose character is a cross-dressing constable.
The Dressmaker is the first feature in 18 years from Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse, whose success here with 1991's Proof took her to Hollywood for How to Make an American Quilt and then an intimate reworking of King Lear, A Thousand Acres.
This is the first film in 18 years from director Jocelyn Moorhouse, who after making a splash with her 1991 breakthrough Proof (the film which launched the careers of Russell Crowe and Hugo Weaving) was unable to gain much in the way of momentum during a brief period in Hollywood.
Adapted by Moorhouse (“Proof”) and cowriter P. J. Hogan from the novel by Rosalie Ham, the film contains a revenge comedy, a love story, a whodunit, and a tragic melodrama that the filmmakers have stitched together spiritedly but can’t make compatible.
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.
After almost two decades away from directing, Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, How to Make an American Quilt) returns with this bizarre home-grown curiosity.
Ms. Moorhouse (whose previous films include “Proof” and “How to Make an American Quilt” ) and her costume and production designers make the most of the period setting, and it’s fun to watch good actors play dress-up, especially Mr. Weaving, whose character is a cross-dressing constable.
The Dressmaker is the first feature in 18 years from Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse, whose success here with 1991's Proof took her to Hollywood for How to Make an American Quilt and then an intimate reworking of King Lear, A Thousand Acres.
After almost two decades away from directing, Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, How to Make an American Quilt) returns with this bizarre home-grown curiosity.
After a smashing Aussie debut with 1991's Proof, Moorhouse worked in Hollywood with scant success on How To Make an American Quilt (1995) and A Thousand Acres (1997).
Jocelyn Moorhouse (“How to Make an American Quilt”) attempts to direct it like a Western but with Barry Sonnenfeld wide angle lens freak-outs.
You would be forgiven for thinking the filmmaker who made that film, one of the true Australian greats, as well as How to Make an American Quilt and A Thousand Acres didn’t have a hand in The Dressmaker, but stranger things have happened and maybe she's just a little bit rusty behind the camera.
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 Dressmaker is the first feature in 18 years from Australian filmmaker Jocelyn Moorhouse, whose success here with 1991's Proof took her to Hollywood for How to Make an American Quilt and then an intimate reworking of King Lear, A Thousand Acres.
Aussie director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s first feature in nearly 20 years (since 1997’s “A Thousand Acres”) is, rather, a rowdy Down Under prodigal-daughter saga.
Moorhouse — who hasn’t made a film since 1997’s A Thousand Acres, which is ridiculous — didn’t just direct but also adapted (with P.J. Hogan, a dude) Rosalie Ham’s novel, and she pulls no punches when it comes to the distinct sort of soul-crushing that women can be subjected to.
Jocelyn Moorhouse, directing her first film since 1997’s “A Thousand Acres,” fashions “The Dressmaker” as a bizarre little ode to her Australian homeland.
After a smashing Aussie debut with 1991's Proof, Moorhouse worked in Hollywood with scant success on How To Make an American Quilt (1995) and A Thousand Acres (1997).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.”
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 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.
Veteran DoP Don McAlpine (Moulin Rouge, My Brilliant Career) knows how to shoot a period film so that it looks both nostalgic and modern.
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.
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“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.