Movie Review: "Ladies in Black" Will Leave You Saying "Meh" to the Dress

Rich performances and richer dresses make up for the fraying threads of Ladies In Black's script.

Ladies In Black sure has a lot of stories to tell, from the myriad difficulties faced by women in Sydney circa 1959 to the struggle of 'New Australians' in the wake of the Second World War. It also depicts the ungodly trials of being a tortured Christmas casual at a department store. (The horror, the horror…)

There’s a lot to chew on. Thankfully, director Bruce Beresford has assembled a sterling cast to do the chewing, including Rachael Taylor and Alison McGirr, as the experienced shopgirls at Goode’s, the fictional boutique at the movie’s center. There’s Angourie Rice, as a 16-year-old Goode's employee anxiously waiting on her exam results (and conspiring with her mum, played by Susie Porter, to convince her dad, played by Shane Jacobson, to let her go to uni). And there’s even Julia Ormond, as a chic Slovenian refugee who oversees Goode’s haute couture.

Over one season, they bond and interfere in one another’s lives, or, in some cases, suffer silently from the era’s prejudices. They also model resplendent, period-perfect dresses, and make frequent cracks about Melbourne. Seriously, Melbourne gets s*** on so regularly here, you’d think the picture was on Metamucil. But that's as salty as this otherwise gentle, sweet film gets.

Beresford and Sue Milliken wrote the script, adapting Madeleine St. John's book The Women In Black (subtly renamed, I’m guessing, to distinguish it from a certain other horror series). Serendipitously, it’s now the second Aussie flick in as many months to trumpet the contribution of immigrants to Australian culture, after The Merger.

This one focuses on an older generation of refugees; specifically, Europeans fleeing fascist or communist turmoil. But Ladies In Black goes about it in a funny way, casting local Ryan Corr as a nattily dressed, thickly accented Hungarian émigré who woos Taylor’s unrefined—though forever regal—Faye. Corr is appealing, and usually the best thing in some very bad features (see his never-say-die turn as a cockney villain in A Few Less Men; actually, don’t). Yet, if Beresford was hoping to challenge Faye—and the audience’s—racial bias by romanticising a mysterious refugee, the casting of the very-familiar Corr kind-of undermines the objective.

That’s just one way in which the well-meaning movie falls short of its good intentions. Other character arcs are half-baked—especially McGirr’s, who gives a film-best performance as the desirous yet romantically-denied Patty—while the intermittent moments of comedy reach for lazy slapstick or fall on awkward pauses. Nonetheless, there are many pleasures throughout Ladies In Black, be it Porter and Rice’s honest and lived-in mother-daughter exchanges, or every scene with the British Ormond, who can’t help but class up the joint with her presence, even if she's leaning hard into a fake accent too.

3/5

In Australian cinemas 20 September. Rated PG for mild coarse language.

Header Image: Sony Pictures