The Dressmaker, film review: Kate Winslet and the age gap we can’t ignore

Jocelyn Moorhouse, apparently convinced that viewers can’t handle a mature female heroine, has made a movie that feels infinitely more antiquated than Billy Wilder’s 1950 film noir, says Charlotte O'Sullivan
Free spirits: Teddy
Universal Pictures
Charlotte O'Sullivan20 November 2015

In this wannabe black farce, adapted from Rosalie Ham’s best-selling novel, Hunger Games actor Liam Hemsworth plays Kate Winslet’s love interest. Hemsworth is 15 years younger than Winslet and, asked to comment on the age gap, the film’s female director/writer Jocelyn Moorhouse declared: “The lover in the novel is younger and Rosalie doesn’t make a big deal about it. I decided that I wouldn’t make a big deal of it either.”

Pah! Moorhouse makes a huge deal of the age gap, precisely because she pretends it doesn’t exist. We’re asked to believe that Winslet’s character — gutsy fashion whizz Tilly — is actually a peer of hunky, sensitive farmer Teddy (Hemsworth). When she returns from Paris to her childhood home in small-town Fifties Australia, Teddy tells his family, “I haven’t seen her since she was a kid!” Meanwhile, one of Tilly’s ex-classmates, Gertrude, is played by a twentysomething (who looks like one).

Winslet doesn’t. I kept hoping someone would make sense of the weirdness by exclaiming, “Is it just me, or has Tilly been prematurely aged by her sojourn in Europe?” But no. Moorhouse just tries to brazen it out.

Winslet is a magnificent actress with a magnificent face (though Tilly has an hourglass figure, it’s her cheeks that make you think of a whalebone corset, the lunging curves are just so fierce). It’s only within this silly set-up that her experienced flesh becomes an eyesore.

At one point, Tilly’s bitchy, dilapidated mum Molly (Judy Davis, excellent value) shrieks with horror as she watches clips of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. We’re meant to see how the town’s misogyny has infected Molly’s view of “older women”. It’s impossible, though, to take The Dressmaker’s feminism seriously. Moorhouse, apparently convinced that viewers can’t handle a mature female heroine, has made a movie that feels infinitely more antiquated than Billy Wilder’s 1950 film noir.

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1/99

I can’t help feeling sorry for Moorhouse (the once-wonderful creator of 1991 classic Proof, who hasn’t made a film for 18 years and had to contend with the death of her mother during pre-production).

Her film about a skilful, sexy free spirit, while old-fashioned, is nevertheless too messy and angry to click with the kind of audiences who flocked to Chocolat. The Dressmaker deserves, at least, to become a cult item. Picture being forced to stand still while a lunatic sticks pins in your soft bits. In between the agony and the tedium, your ribs may get tickled.

Cert 12A, 118 mins

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