The manic and madcap couture fable The Dressmaker features Hugo Weaving in drag, a shirtless Hemsworth brother (Liam, in this case) and the indomitable Judy Davis in full-blown crone mode as “mad” Molly – but it’s the wickedly chic Kate Winslet, who knows how to wield a red-carpet wardrobe like a weapon, who sashays away with the picture.
The period piece, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse (How to Make an American Quilt), is set in 1951 rural Australia and concerns the revenge wreaked by Molly’s prodigal daughter, Tilly (Winslet), a fashion designer with satin-draped swagger.
The film is based on Rosalie Ham’s bestselling 2000 novel, which Moorhouse adapted herself with co-writer (and husband) P.J. Hogan, whose previous and similarly campy hit film Muriel’s Wedding she produced. “It’s a beautiful book,” the director says, “lush with descriptiveness not just of clothes. Just the way she talks about flowers! It was actually very helpful because she wrote it in such a visual and sensual way that it inspired me.”
Much of the novel’s empathy also resonated with Moorhouse. “My father has dementia and had just been diagnosed, so it was very important and meaningful to me and we made more of the mother-daughter relationship,” she says. “There was a lot of that care-giving going on in my own life.”
Another character, a young man the townsfolk describe as “not quite finished,” also hit home. “I have two children with autism,” Moorhouse adds, “so I know all about loving wild, unruly, complicated, sometimes violent but gorgeous creatures.” (This is Moorhouse’s first feature since A Thousand Acres 18 years ago, and both family proximity and access to specialized health care are among the reasons she and her family left Los Angeles a few years ago and returned to their native Australia.)
Ham has jokingly called The Dressmaker “Unforgiven, with a sewing machine,” but Moorhouse likens it more to “Under Milk Wood – on acid.” Accordingly, she dialled up the scenery-chewing as well as the scenery itself: Her team constructed an entire town in the Outback. Production designer Roger Ford took inspiration from mid-century artist Sir Russell Drysdale’s desolate landscape paintings of the Australian interior, particularly the old corrugated iron and timber construction of former gold rush town Sofala.
“The novel is heightened reality, definitely stylized – I took that as my permission and made it even more so,” she continues. “The story would never work as a naturalistic film, it would be unbelievable. But if I make the setting more fantasy-like, a fable with just a little bit of magical realism, it’s more like an Australian spaghetti western. And Don [cinematographer McAlpine] shot it that way, because he’d always wanted to make a Sergio Leone movie. Albeit a female-centric one – instead of pistols at dawn, we have needles and thread.”
True to a title that suggests the disruptive power of clothes, the director put her subscription to the Vogue Archives to good use and created lookbooks of 1950s haute couture to inspire the work of costume designers Margot Wilson and Marion Boyce (of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries). Their homages range from Christian Dior’s New Look to the satin Jean Louis dress worn by Rita Hayworth’s Gilda.
Moorhouse says it was even a book about suave fashion designer Jacques Fath that persuaded Weaving (whom she directed in the 1991 psychological thriller Proof) to take the role.
“He was doing Macbeth onstage when I approached him, [who was] covered in blood every night, a full bushy beard,” she recalls. “I told him he might like to have a break from being mister horrible Scottish homicidal king.” Although lest anyone think The Dressmaker is gentle, Moorhouse says with a cackle: “There’s a lot of anger. There’s a lot of pain, actually. But there’s also a lot of comedy. It’s survival humour.” Dressing well may be the best revenge, but it’s not the only one.