Desperate Remedies
Directed and written by Stewart Main and Peter Wells
At Melbourne's Kino Cinema from November 26, Sydney's Mandolin and Perth's Paradiso from December 2
Reviewed by Peter Boyle
If you liked Orlando, you should like Desperate Remedies, a New Zealand film which was selected for showing at Cannes this year in the Un Certain Regard. It is a subversive historical romance and an extravagant costume melodrama set in a mythical British colonial settlement in the 19th century. The directors have discarded traditional cinematic forms to present a film more like a play enhanced with the special effects possible only in cinema.
At the centre of the action is a woman who has built a successful dressmaking business but is coming up against the social limits for women in Victorian society. Around her swirl the men who seek to manipulate and exploit her as well as the men and women she seeks to manipulate and exploit. All are confined by their choices in life, and all seek desperate remedies to their problems.
A maelstrom of subterfuge, deceit, power games and sexual intrigue comes with lashings of rich colour and stirring operatic music. The acting is extremely melodramatic, and the whole film was shot within a huge warehouse in Auckland within which designer Michael Kane created sets which stress both the extravagant opulence of the colonial elite and the savage brutality of life at the bottom.
This film makes a strong statement against the typically sanitised historical representations of colonial settlement and deals boldly and entertainingly with the themes of sexual and gender politics. Politically it goes a little further than Orlando in identifying the commercialisation of the relations between people as a central factor.