Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
Directed by Anthony Fabian
Focus Features, 115 minutes, PG
★★★★
Sometimes when you see a movie shapes how you feel about it. Normally I’d rate a film like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris a solid three, but watching it on Christmas Eve induced enough warm fuzzies that I bumped it up to a four. It oozes charm, even though objectively speaking it’s Disney-meets-Hallmark and an extended advertisement for Christian Dior.
This is the third adaptation of novelist Paul Gallico’s Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris (1958), this time with Lesley Manville as Ava Harris. It’s 1957 London and we meet Ada walking across the Albert Bridge looking haggard and melancholy. She’s a cleaning lady for thoughtless toffs such as Lady Dant (Anna Chancellor), irresponsible actress wannabe Pamela Penrose (Rose Williams), and other bourgeois blatherskites. In addition, though World War II has been over for twelve years, Ada continues to hope that her husband Eddie will magically turn up. She and her best friend Violet Butterfield (Ellen Thomas) live in tenement flats, visit the local pub to chat with other middled-aged folks, watch young people cavort, play the numbers, and dream of a windfall. Ada’s desires are further fueled when she picks up clothing casually strewn about by Lady Dant that includes a Dior gown worth £500 (about $15,000 in today’s money). Ava sighs as she fondles the material. But can Lady Dant cough up the backpay she owes Ada? There’s always an excuse!
One day, Ada’s numbers win and collects her payout from the local bookie. It’s not a fortune by any means, but she bets £100 at the track on a dog called Haute Couture, though her friend Archie (Jason Issacs) begs her not to do so. She loses and tells herself that downtrodden people should not yearn for a Dior gown. This is reinforced when she definitely learns of Eddie’s fate. As happens in fairy tales such as Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, a sudden peripeteia provides Ada with just enough money to travel to Paris to buy her dream “frock.”
Of course, a cockney such as she has little understanding of how such things work. One does not simply stroll into Dior, select something from the rack, and fly back to London the same day. She is told that in so many words by Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), the floor manager at Dior, who is appalled that such a coarse and frumpish woman would even deign to enter Dior, let along be able afford their wares. When she slaps money on the desk, the good-hearted Ava finds several champions, including the widowed Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson), who is offended by how shabbily she was treated; Dior accountant Lucas Bravo (André Fauvel), who knows that Dior is in financial trouble; and overworked star model Natasha (Alba Baptista), who admires Ada’s pluck.
Ada finds herself (sort of) stranded in Paris for several weeks, but can a cockney lass make the best of it? She has truly entered a dream world, despite a garbage strike, working-class demonstrations, and Madame Colbert shooting daggers from her eyes. When Ada gets a close-up look at how Dior works–designers, cloth buyers, seamstresses, models–she is the equivalent of Willie Wonka inside the chocolate factory. Does she get her gown? I will say only that it’s not an unequivocable yes.
The dresses in the film were expertly designed by Jenny Beavan based on archival sketches in the Dior archives. To betray a personal bias, I generally find the entire realm of high fashion faintly ridiculous and conspicuous consumption at its worst. Mrs. Harris, though, makes no pretense of being anything other an unorthodox variant of Cinderella. Manville is terrific as Ada and easily moves between kind, feisty, amazed, sad, and unapologetic. She knows who she isn’t and sees through phonies. There are lots of, shall we say, exaggerated moments in the film–friendly winos, a strike straight out of Norma Rae, comeuppances, and a romance based upon existential philosophy. On the flip side, it sometimes skirts (pun intended) the edges of racial stereotyping. But fantasy is fantasy–even to the point that many of the “Paris” scenes were actually filmed in Budapest.
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is not a December tale, but it was a nice way to spend Christmas Eve, or any other evening you’re in the mood for dreaming.
Rob Weir
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