This film based on a novel by Rosalie Ham is set in a tiny and extremely remote village in Australia in the 1950s. The central element of the story is the return of a young woman to this village which she left as a child. The main character is admirably played by Kate Winslet, with her usual shadings of emotion and her admirable skill. She has come for two reasons, to try to re-examine her origins and childhood, and also to wreak vengeance upon those who have wronged her. The main motif of this film thus resembles that of Friedrich Duerenmatt's famous play THE VISIT, which was so brilliantly filmed in 1964 by Bernhard Wicki, with Ingrid Bergman as the woman who returns, and Anthony Quinn as the male lead. That film has undeservedly disappeared from notice, but it was one of the most powerful films made anywhere in the world in the mid-sixties, and contains one of Ingrid Bergman's finest performances of her career. (The next time I watch it, I shall review it.) It used to be impossible to find, but it is now available on DVD, although so few people are aware of its existence that it remains little known. This new film entirely fails to exploit the powerful theme of a woman returning to her village or small town for vengeance. Instead, the director Joselyn Moorhouse (an Ossie by birth) makes excessive excursions into wildly over-the-top satire on small Australian communities (which are also portrayed as intrinsically evil) and attempts at broad humour which are also overdone. Perhaps the humour is some kind of local Australian gnomic humour which those of us who are not Ossies simply cannot grasp. But many of these attempts are just silly. Moorhouse was not cut out for making comedies, and should not try, because she clearly has no reliable comic judgement. The story is thus diluted, like a whiskey and soda with far too much soda and barely any whiskey. One knows the film could have been very powerful, but the focus was lost and it just does not make the grade at all. This is a great pity, and an opportunity wasted. The director clearly never made up her mind whether she was making a tragedy or a comedy, and since she is not Shakespeare (she also collaborated on the script), she could not successfully mix the two. So few people can that it is usually a mistake to try. Despite the best efforts of Winslet and of Judy Davis as her mother, with good support from others as well, the sprawling and blurred uncertainty of the director's intentions left one wondering just what her purpose in making the film really was. The film is entertaining because everyone tries so hard. But it does not actually 'work', and is like one of those inferior Chinese takeaways that leaves you hungry again five minutes later.
Review of The Dressmaker
