Kate Winslet tries on role in 'The Dressmaker'

The Cannes Film Festival isn't just about showing movies, but finding investors for current projects. Embarkment Films announced that it is shopping international distribution rights to Kate Winslet's The Dressmaker at the festival. Jocelyn Moorhouse (How to Make an American Quilt, Proof) is directing the 1940s-set movie, which will start production in the fall.

Winslet will play a woman who returns to the small town she grew up in, clad in the sharpest outfits the 1940s had to offer. She was accused of murder there years earlier. Many of the townspeople
shun her, while others find themselves intrigued by her outfits and start adopting her style. After transforming the townspeople, she also exacts revenge on those who implicated her in the terrible crime. Variety calls her character an "avenging angel," which suggests there may be some supernatural elements.

Seeing a sleepy town with backwards values open itself up is fun to watch, even if it's been done many times before, in movies ranging from Pleasantville to Chocolat. There's also a sense that The Dressmaker may include a feminist awakening similar to how The Help had a racial awakening, as characters were satisfyingly brought up to a more modern sensibility.

Winslet's last big roles were in Contagion and Carnage, back in 2011. She'll be seen again in Labor Day, coming out this fall, and is currently filming a role in Shailene Woodley-led Divergent, an adaptation of a Hunger Games-style novel for young adults. She's also appearing with Stanley Tucci in a movie about landscape designers competing for a contract in Versailles, A Little Chaos.

Moorhouse, who also wrote the script for the project, doesn't have as many directing credits as I would expect for someone who made American Quilt a modest success. Whether that's by chance or design, who knows, but I certainly am looking forward to a work that combines the talents of Moorhouse and Winslet.