In 1950s Australia, beautiful, talented dressmaker Tilly returns to her tiny hometown to right wrongs from her past. Thanks to her sewing machine and haute couture style, she transforms the women and exacts revenge on those who did her wrong.
Actually, it's Hogan's sensibility that is the real star of The Dressmaker. He adapts the Rosalie Ham novel, a neo-feminist soap opera, to salute the indefatigable brotherhood and sisterhood of women and gay men who struggle to find acceptance and love.
The film has so many moodswings that watching it induces whiplash, and just about everybody in it, from Winslet on down to Judy Davis, playing the dressmaker's crotchety mother, flagrantly overdoes it.
"The Dressmaker" wraps a pig pen of a town and its porky inhabitants in silk. It tackles the feeling of being cursed by your confines and the toxicity of small town gossip mongering; with beauty, death, romance and hilarity.
