I don't know much about that module, but if parse_file() isn't very persistent, then perhaps you could slurp the file into a string and continue using the parse() method instead

For larger files you might be better off using File::Slurp or something

use File::Slurp 'read_file';

my $html = "/path/to/file.html";
my $str = read_file($html);
[download]

Once you've done that, then you can just parse $str as you normally would a string.