By Jake Wilson
Ladies In Black ★★★★
(PG) 109 minutes
Bruce Beresford presents a puzzle to those who look for consistent patterns: what could unify a career that spans the whole history of modern Australian cinema? Part of the answer is suggested by the title of one of his recognised classics, the Henry Handel Richardson adaptation The Getting of Wisdom. Many of his films are concerned with learning experiences and moments of transition, whether individual, social or both.
Alison McGirr, Angourie Rice and Rachael Taylor in Ladies in Black. Credit: Anna Steel
Several characters gain some degree of wisdom in Beresford's Ladies in Black, based on the novel The Women in Black by his late friend Madeleine St John: a film fought for years to make, and which he can count as a personal triumph.
Set in Sydney in 1959, the story centres on the frock department of a fictitious upmarket store called Goode's, a microcosm of a country on the cusp of change.
Beresford was born and raised in Sydney, belonging to the same generation as his heroine Lesley (Angourie Rice), a bookish teenager who signs on at Goode's to help with the Christmas rush.
Many of the period details thus carry the authority of first-hand experience, restored to life with judicious use of digital effects: the brick and weatherboard cottages with their tiled roofs, the trams trundling down to Circular Quay, the ferries crossing the harbour, all looking fresh as paint.
Fresher, possibly, than the city ever appeared in life―but then the film makes no secret of its nostalgia. Its trick is that it's both real and unreal, proposing that the most ordinary place imaginable can also be seen in hindsight as a lost, magical world.
Toiling through their daily routines and longing for excitement, the characters are unaware they have been positioned all along on what might as well be a musical comedy set (The Women In Black was, in fact, the basis for a recent stage musical, with songs by Tim Finn).
The frock department itself is a kind of magic theatre, a space of transformation for both the customers and the staff. The agent of this transformation is Magda (Julia Ormond), a Slovenian cocktail-gown specialist who came to Australia after the war with her Hungarian husband Stefan (Vincent Perez), spending time in a migrant camp along the way.
While Magda's continental manners attract suspicion from the other ladies at Goode's, she proves to be a positive, dynamic force – befriending Lesley, finding a suitable man for the lovelorn Fay (Rachael Taylor), and indirectly helping the sexually frustrated Patty (Alison McGirr) overcome her difficulties with her repressed husband (Luke Pegler).
St John's novel is a fast, light read, full of art that conceals art. Buffs watching Ladies in Black may be reminded of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy The Shop Around The Corner, a comparable ensemble piece set in a Hungarian gift shop; Beresford honours the Lubitsch tradition of treating large matters lightly.
Sex is a central subject, but handled mostly indirectly and via euphemism. Likewise, pain is acknowledged without being lingered upon, another form of the sophistication embodied by Magda.
True to this tradition, all the characters are solidly outlined types, from the shyly smiling Lesley to her weary mother (Susie Porter, never better) and gruff father (Shane Jacobson), to the head of the frock department (Noni Hazlehurst), who observes the younger employees from a wry distance. The fun of the film lies in seeing these types reveal new possibilities and hidden depths – even if just for a moment.
Looming over everything is the promise and weight of the future: if Lesley makes it to Sydney University, she will be a contemporary of Beresford and St John themselves, not to mention Germaine Greer (the libertarians said to cluster on campus get a fleeting but significant mention).
From our vantage point 60 years on, Ladies in Black offers a vision – idealised, but perhaps not wholly false – of a moment when it was possible to welcome newcomers to the country and the unfamiliar ideas they brought with them. In this sense, it's also a film about the present. But yet another mark of Beresford's sophistication is that he doesn't need to spell this out.