DESPERATE REMEDIES is a furious, deliberately demented bodice-ripper from New Zealand that seems conceived exclusively for high-camp or low-character crowds. "At a distant point of empire, in a town called Hope, a ship docks bearing immigrants," read the opening titles; what follows, to
the turgid strains of Berlioz, Verdi, and Strauss, is a breathless romp through all manner of boy-girl, girl-girl, and girl-boy-girl sexcapades.
Dorothea Brook (Jennifer Ward-Lealand) is the woman in red, a draper of some distinction in the 1860s port of Auckland. On the docks one night, she passes a card to Lawrence Hayes (Kevin Smith), a swarthy lad who's just arrived from England, offering him "a singular opportunity" at her shop in
town. Dorothea has a sister, Rose (Kiri Mills), who's addicted to laudanum; her slithering dandy of a drug dealer, Fraser (Cliff Curtis), holds her in his thrall. Hiring an eligible bachelor as houseboy seems like a good way of cleaning house. Meanwhile, the evil local banker, Poyser (Michael
Hurst), offers Dorothea a lucrative contract for army uniforms in exchange for her hand in marriage, which she must tender in order to avoid the impropriety of a single woman's doing army business. Dorothea's lover and business counsel Anne Cooper (Lisa Chappell) is all for the marriage, but
intends to carry on their affair.
Then Lawrence falls madly in lust with Dorothea. Poyser runs amuck and sets fire to the town, blaming it on infidels, to mobilize the army against imagined insurrections. Dorothea tracks a disconsolate Lawrence to an opium den and bribes him with rubies to join Rose on the next boat to San
Francisco. But Lawrence misses the scheduled rendezvous and Dorothea, thinking she has been betrayed, begs Fraser to leave Rose in peace; he demands she offer herself in exchange. A subsequent showdown sees the two men wrestling while stripped to the waist; Lawrence leaves with Rose.
Two years pass. Fraser attends a party at the home of Dorothea, now the banker's wife. He brings word that Lawrence has become a criminal and political agitator. A letter arrives from Lawrence: Rose and their baby are dead, claimed by typhoid. He returns the rubies, now set into a ring. Then, in
quick succession, Fraser informs Poyser of his wife's lesbian trysts; Cooper arranges for Fraser to rendezvous with Dorothea out in the marshes; a crimson-shrouded figure stabs Fraser to the heart, only to be revealed as Cooper herself; Poyser confronts Dorothea with her affairs at the opera; and
Dorothea goes to the press with Poyser's arson scam. A final scene shows Dorothea and Cooper boarding a ship at night, where they meet the returning Lawrence on the gangway. With a nod and a wink, the two women go aboard, arm in arm.
Poised between melodrama and camp, everything about the film is dizzyingly, stylistically hyper-realized. The camerawork is a self-conscious tour de force, recreating the dissolve through a ceiling from CITIZEN KANE, breaking the 180 rule repeatedly in a static conversation. Matches erupt like
torches; metal trays scrape like scabbards. Interiors (and most exteriors, shot on soundstages) blaze color; every costume gown is a period wet dream. But to what end, ultimately, is anybody's guess. (Violence, extensive nudity, adult situations, substance abuse, profanity.) leave a comment