Dark Dresses, Problematic Pleasures: Mobility and Nostalgia in Bruce Beresford's 'Ladies in Black'

This screen adaptation stays true to its source text's lively recounting of the travails and tricky relationships of its eponymous cohort. More significantly, it channels postwar Australia's consumerist optimism and complicated views on gender and migration – all of which, writes Mel Campbell, are given a shinier, more simplistic veneer in Bruce Beresford's two-decades-in-the-making film.

Additional keywords:
intercultural romance, ethnicity, immigration, Julia Ormond, The Women in Black, Madeleine St John, Noni Hazlehurst, fashion, haute couture, The Dressmaker, period, historical, consumerism, cosmopolitanism, urban, city, shopgirl, 1950s, fifties.