There’s something chokingly terrible about this film, with its two-hour accumulation of sentimentality building to a pure, clanging wrongness in the tonally misjudged mix of unfunny smalltown comedy and unconvincing smalltown tragedy. Kate Winslet does her best, but there’s nothing she can do with this unbearable and unbearably long movie. She plays Myrtle Dunnage, returning to her dusty Australian hometown in the early 1950s: she is a fashionista, a dressmaker with experience of Paris and Milan: haughty, glorious and glamorous, carrying her Singer sewing machine like a gunfighter with his pistol. It seems the mean-minded, petty population drove her out of town when she was just a kid, for reasons finally and tiresomely revealed in flashback. So now she has a score to settle with one and all, including her cantankerous old mum (Judy Davis) and nasty schoolteacher (Kerry Fox) – but she also finds sympathy from fashion-conscious police officer Sergeant Barrat (Hugo Weaving) and gorgeous semi-clothed neighbour Teddy (Liam Hemsworth). The film’s flower of awfulness only properly blooms when it becomes clear that Myrtle’s dressmaking creations can improve everyone’s lives and liberate them from stilted narrow moralism – like Juliette Binoche’s coy confectionery in a similar, if French, smalltown in Chocolat (2000). The final shift of mood is horribly jarring and unconvincing, and doesn’t even end the film, which drags on to the two-hour mark. Surely Winslet can find better roles than this.
