Ladies in Black, Bruce Beresford, Madeleine St John, Allanah Zitserman
Bruce Beresford has finally achieved the dream of bringing his friend’s book to life.
Bruce Beresford and Peter James are having a lovely time. It’s just after 9am at Fox Studios in Sydney’s Moore Park and the 70-somethings are hard at it making their 13th movie together. They stand in close with their headphones on, the taller Beresford bending slightly, his hand on his colleague’s shoulder. It’s intense and intimate as they stare into the screen showing the scene being recorded just metres away. Then, it’s done. Not a word is exchanged but director Beresford and director of photography James are on the same wavelength. “Cut!” says the man who has waited for 25 years to make this film.
Ladies in Black, which opens in September, is the film that almost got away from Beresford and his friend and producer Sue Milliken — a film the funding agencies kept rejecting and the one whose time has suddenly come.
It’s the film of the book The Women in Black, which Beresford optioned from Australian author Madeleine St John in the early 1990s. He and St John were contemporaries at Sydney University back in the 1950s, the era in which the book and the film are set; much later, they were friends in London.
St John died in 2006 without seeing her book, set in a fictional version of the department store David Jones, come to the screen.
“I promised Madeleine I would make this film,” Beresford says between takes at Fox.
Would she have been pleased with how it’s turning out?
“It was very hard to please Madeleine,” he says, in a nod to the expat author’s legendary irascibility.
In truth, it is likely St John would have been thrilled by a movie that closely follows her book about the teenage Lisa Miles, who “comes of age” during her summer sales stint at Goode’s thanks to her encounters with the “ladies in black” — the sales assistants who look after the cocktail frocks and model gowns.
Lisa learns most from the redoubtable Magda, a post-war refugee or “Continental” who tutors the Aussie kid, straight out of whitebread suburbia, in the finer points of fashion as well as continental meats. It’s a story about the transition to adulthood — not just for Lisa but for Australia — and its comedic elements are closely intertwined with ideas about tolerance, identity and gender.
At its core is the action in the dress departments, where the protagonists learn about life against the backdrop of couture clothing and where Lisa — the brainiac who reads poetry in her lunch break — falls in love with a very special party dress.
At Fox, with store dummies dressed in Elizabeth Arden and Yves St Laurent, the racks of frocks and cabinets of handbags and accessories are a faithful take on a 50s department store.
On set, British actress Julia Ormond (Mad Men), as Magda, explains to Lisa, played by 17-year-old Australian star-in-waiting Angourie Rice (Spider-Man: Homecoming, The Beguiled, Every Day), that sentiment should never get in the way of sales. Then Ormond slips out for a quick cigarette while Beresford — who is renowned for his calm and amiable style on set — has a quiet chat to James, the camera director he counts as “one of the very best” he has worked with around the world, in a career that goes back half a century.
Australians have been delighted by The Women in Black (written in 1993) since it was reissued by Text Publishing in 2009. It has sold more than 30,000 copies, which is regarded as high given that St John is not around to publicise her work. Audiences loved the musical version by Tim Finn, also called Ladies in Black, which has had strong seasons in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney since its inaugural performance in November 2015, and could well become an Australian classic.
All this has helped Beresford — whose international career includes director credits on more than 30 feature films, including the 1990 Academy Award winner, Driving Miss Daisy — and co-producer Milliken get the money together after 25 years of trying.
But the X-factor has been the involvement of Allanah Zitserman as co-producer. Zitserman, has impressive entrepreneurial credentials: she has produced three movies, including Russian Doll (2001), and set up the Dungog Film Festival in NSW’s Hunter Region in 2005.
“If it hadn’t been for Allanah’s dynamism, we’d never have got the money,” says Beresford. “She was relentless. Sue and I had tried so hard and we nearly got finance several times. Allanah said to me, ‘I bet I can get it done’ — and she could.”
Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions is the international distributor and the film has major investment from Screen Australia, in association with Create NSW, along with a host of other investors and branded content partners.
The cast includes Rachael Taylor (Jessica Jones, Red Dog, Transformers) in the role of Fay Baines; Ryan Corr (Holding the Man) as Rudi; Susie Porter (Seven Types of Ambiguity) and Shane Jacobson (Kenny, The Dressmaker) as Lisa’s parents, with Noni Hazlehurst (A Place to Call Home) as Miss Cartwright.
Zitserman is from a new generation of filmmakers. Unlike Milliken and Beresford, both born in 1940, she did not live through the era depicted in the film, though as an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who came here at the age of three, she identifies strongly with a key theme.
“It captures an incredibly nuanced and intricate aspect of who we are as a nation and does it with such wit and charm you don’t feel that anything is jammed at you,” she says. “You are totally entertained”.
And as something of a fashion tragic herself, she loves the book’s setting: “I am obsessed with fashion,” she says. “Madeleine would not have used the word feminism but she captures the dynamic of a woman who likes clothes and falls in love with that dress. That doesn’t mean that you are not a feminist. Lisa is as desperate about the dress as she is about getting into Sydney Uni, and there are a lot of us like that.”
Zitserman’s pivotal role in funding demonstrates that women are having a moment in film, with agencies keen to bolster gender equity in the industry — and on the screen.
She also credits the emergence of a specific audience for films such as Ladies in Black: “The 35-plus female audience is so strong, and it’s thriving and growing. It is a very good audience, a reliable audience: you know what they are going to like, they know what they are looking for, and you know that they will come, that they will pay, and that they won’t download. The success of movies like Brooklyn and Carol and The Dressmaker clearly shows that there is a strong appetite for this type of content.”
Text boss Michael Heyward agrees. “We’ve been aware of this for a long time in the books industry,” he says. He says that The Dressmaker, which took about $20 million at the box office, a high figure for a local movie, has had a big impact on the way backers are looking at projects.
Text is republishing The Women in Black as a movie tie-in — it will be retitled Ladies in Black for maximum impact. Heyward is hoping for strong sales: the 2000 eponymous novel that prompted The Dressmaker has sold close to 200,000 units in hard copies and ebooks since it was republished as a film tie-in.
Heyward sees the St John book and the film as “a snapshot of the moment when everything changed in Australia”, with post-war immigration and the “breaking wave of feminism”, and says that “the irony is that this cheerful, even affectionate, portrait of a society in transition was written by an expat who vowed never to return to the country of her birth and never did”.
That the novel is now so well-known is down in part to serendipity: St John died in straitened circumstances in London public housing, unsuccessfully trying to finish her fifth book as she battled emphysema. The Women in Black had sold modestly in Britain, with limited copies distributed in Australia. It was out of print when, 15 years later, Penny Hueston, a senior editor at Text (and Heyward’s partner), read it after a book club friend recommended it. Text published it in paperback as part of its successful Text Classics series, along with St John’s other novels — The Essence of the Thing (short-listed for the 1997 Booker Prize), A Pure Clear Light and A Stairway to Paradise. Those three “London novels” were well received but The Women in Black is the local favourite.
Co-producer Milliken (The Odd Angry Shot; Paradise Road), who co-wrote the film script with Beresford, confesses that it’s a strange experience to see “something you cared about so much and for so long and had given up on professionally, and it arrives and it is pretty much as one hoped it would be”.
She says the script has not changed much from the first draft so long ago: she and Beresford spent years adding material to appease potential backers, then they took it all out.
“It has come back pretty much to what it was in the beginning and is pretty faithful to the book,” Milliken says. “Times have changed and now people love this script, whereas back in the 1990s and 2000s all the script assessors were saying it was a boring script and not worth doing. It’s an effervescent moment for women: it’s not aggressively feminist but there is support for that.
“The script is so clear because it has layers — feminism, immigration and tolerance. And it’s funny. It’s about difference and change and opportunity. The girls in the store — Fay and Patty — are ignorant and intolerant. They have not had any education. It’s a story about knowledge. Once you have knowledge, you are not so intolerant.”
Ladies in Black is the first Australian film Beresford has made since Mao’s Last Dancer (2009). The director’s long list of local credits — from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie to Breaker Morant, The Getting of Wisdom, Puberty Blues, and The Fringe Dwellers — has helped explain and shape our culture but he says he has always been more interested in characters and their stories rather than being didactic or political in his work.
Ladies in Black is also very personal. “We carefully set the movie back in 1959 because there was no way you could update it,” he says. “It was an era I remember so vividly and I was so aware of the changes under way because of migration, because where I lived in Wentworthville (25km west of the Sydney CBD) we were very near the Villawood migrant camp. My father had a shop in Windsor (55km northwest of the city centre). All the Hungarians came there after the revolution and I met so many of those people.”
Beresford sees Australia as much more sophisticated and accepting than when he made Barry McKenzie in 1972, and credits the internet with broadening our minds. His own lessons in tolerance came early: after a dismal time in London in the 60s, when he could not kickstart the career he wanted in film, he took a job as a film editor in Nigeria, where he spent two formative years as the “only white man in the film industry”.
Beresford says he was not influenced by Tim Finn’s approach to the story — which tended to emphasise the feminist element in St John’s original — but commissioned Finn to write a song for the end credits. He sees a delicate balance between the comedy and drama in the work: “That’s one of the things I liked about Driving Miss Daisy, and a lot of David Williamson’s work. Films get a bit heavy, they sort of slug away at you with their holier-than-thou attitude. It never really appeals to me terribly.”
At 77, Beresford has no plans to ease up. “Why should I stop?” he says. “It’s better than having a real job.”
His trick is to keep looking for new projects. Beresford reads every script or treatment sent to him and says he would not have made half the films he has if he had not done so. But there have been frustrations: “I think the films I haven’t made that I wanted to make would be better than the ones I have made, but for some reason or another we never got them financed. It’s amazing what doesn’t get finance.”
No matter. He has plenty to do. His love of opera has led him to direct several big productions and his version of Rossini’s Otello for the Melbourne Opera opens in October. He says you wouldn’t do opera direction for the money, noting the complex oversight of casting, choreography and set design, but adds: “Opera always grips me. Musicals I can quite enjoy but opera really carries me away.”
He is optimistic about the future of Australian film.
“They all go on all the time about the doom and gloom but it seems to me that there’s a continuous stream of rather good films,” he says. “There are a lot of really good filmmakers now. It will never stop.”
Zitserman says that there is a lot of talent in the industry here but “we need to excite international players about what we are doing and get them on board. We have to tell the Australian story well and the rest will follow. That’s what Bruce’s generation did. They were a community, a rat pack, and that’s what you have to do — back each other up.”
Helen Trinca is the author of Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John (2013), which will be republished in September.
Ladies in Black will be in cinemas from September 20.