Jocelyn Moorhouse has made just five films in four decades of filmmaking. Her second feature PROOF is a modern masterpiece and this 2015 adaptation of a Rosalie Ham novel isn't far off that.
This is probably Kate Winslet's finest hour thus far, playing the 'maybe' murderess Myrtle Dunnage, who returns to her vipers nest of a home town having reinvented herself as a purveyor of fine haute couture. Her return to the outback town of Dungatar is built upon the idea of exacting revenge upon a small population that wronged her and her mother (played with gleeful mania by an almost unrecognisable Judy Davis). The film opens like a Spaghetti western, and for good reason, for this is a jet black comedy modelled on HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER.
Moorhouse has always had a blackly comic sensibility and fundamental affinity for the outsider. She is also that rarest of directors who is able to take risky tonal shifts in her stride. In THE DRESSMAKER things jump from the comic to the grotesque to the romantic to the tragic with all of the alacrity, poise and wit of a Preston Sturges or Rouben Mamoulian. The comedy is hilarious and the drama gut-wrenchingly harsh. Perhaps my only complaint with this slab of Australian weird cinema is that it has to end.
