Desperate Remedies

[Jennifer] Ward-Lealand looks and acts like a cross between Greta Garbo in Queen Christina and Catherine Deneuve. Mr Curtis's Fraser suggests the 50's John Derek wearing too much makeup and a nipple ring. Old-time movie fans will delight in spotting dozens of other homages to an era when the notion that the girl might end up going off with the girl instead of with the boy was unimaginable...

– Reviewer Stephen Holden, in The New York Times, 23 May 1994

An extravagant, opulent and mostly enjoyable exercise in high camp or low kitsch . . .  A feast for the eyes and ears . . .  This ambitious first feature received a mainly positive sendoff in the Certain Regard section, with many hooting cheerfully at the pic's wild extravagances and gay abandon...

– David Stratton reviews one of Desperate Remedies' first screenings, at the Cannes Film Festival, Variety, 7 June 1993

...an exuberant Victorian bodice ripper.

– Screen International

Stewart Main and Peter Wells have written a heady, operatic Victorian romance and played it on the screen absolutely straight. The result is high-camp pathos, alternately hilarious and poignant, in which the most elaborate artifice evokes a surprising, ever-increasing degree of genuine emotion. Artistically, this is risky business indeed, like walking a high wire: a single misstep in tone and control and the entire fragile enterprise collapses. Happily, Wells and Main never stumble, and their film emerges as a glittery triumph, as amusing as an especially fanciful wedding cake or Rose Parade float.

–  Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas, 20 July 1994

I don't know what more I can ask for in a role, really: someone who's strong, passionate, confused...and angry.

– Jennifer Ward-Lealand describes her character of Dorothea, in The Evening Post, 30 September 1993, page 24

Visually thrilling, dramatically arch, Desperate Remedies begins at overwrought and makes a beeline for hysterical. Bodies bulge, bodices rip, opium is eaten and homertoca rages, all in a riot of colour, mostly blood red. This is not your father's 19th-Century novel. It may be your mother's though.

– New York Newsday reviewer John Anderson, 20 May 1994

The town where Dorothea Lives . . . [is] a steaming, fetid, tubercular, rancid hole, full of disease and devoid of right angles. The directors, Wellsian in their contempt for the orthodx frame, also recall Derek Jarman in their use of space (the film was shot in one Auckland studio) and Peter Greenaway in their pure invention.

– New York Newsday reviewer John Anderson, 20 May 1994

The film hits you on every single level of your senses. The audience have to participate — this movie is definitely not a spectator sport. 

– Actor Lisa Chappell describes Desperate Remedies, The Evening Post, 30 September 1993, page 24

Ann was a very contained and restrained woman. I'm so expressive that I had to really work against that. 

– Actor Lisa Chappell describes her role to City Voice writer Bryn Tilly, 30 September 1993, page 24

...the film really belongs to Jennifer Ward-Lealand, who finally gets a role worth her mettle. She graps the role of Dorothea and plays it to the hilt — and, through all the dazzle, she finds the moments that really give the style its content. 

– More reviewer Rachel Lang praises actor Jennifer Ward-Lealand

As a sustained act of imagination, it probably has no precedent in New Zealand  . . . By attacking our prevailing notions of realism on a wide front, this overpowering South Seas melodrama succeeds both as a provocative art-politcal statement and as witty, sensual entertainment. 

– Reviewer Costa Botes in The Dominion, September 1993

It is so different from the standard movie made here that it stakes out for itself almost new ground. It shies away from dependence on landscape, natural light and locatin shooting in favour of stylised sets, exaggerated colour and lighting and the extreme acting manner of melodrama. 

– North and South reviewer Brian McDonnell, September 1993

What have we got to go on in this situation — chance, intuition? I sensed he had a quality.

– Dorothea (Jennifer-Ward Lealand) tries to explain why she picked Lawrence (Kevin Smith) from the crowd