“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” bears fairytale ambition on its finely tailored sleeves.
The film, adapted from a Paul Gallico novel and adding an “H” to the title, follows a woman who seems unlucky in life but on whom fate always smiles. Almost like something magical is happening.
This is more than a riff on “Cinderella” for which multiple references can be discerned. It’s a celebration of fashion; a film that bathes in the stylistic decadence of post-war Europe and presents the worship of threads as an optical aphrodisiac.
It’s Britain in 1957. In the first act, director and co-writer Anthony Fabian deals quite intensively with the suffering of post-war Europe. Ada Harris (Lesley Manville) cleans up after the rich. Some of their customers are nice enough; all are self-obsessed and vain.
Mrs. Harris spots a neglected Christian Dior dress on a bedroom seat and it’s love at first sight. Audiences know this because we get the “Hitchcock zoom,” where the camera pulls back while the lens zooms in. You’ve seen this before and it’s meant to express extreme inner emotions.
Mrs. Harris knows what she wants. But how do you get it? While she’s poor in pockets, our titular character is rich in opportunity. She is raising funds to travel to the House of Dior and choose her dream dress for an upcoming party. She has only one day left before she has to jet back across the Channel.
Although we know those French folks, don’t we? You will make this a challenge.
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More snooty and rude than even the idiots Mrs. Harris suffers from in Britain, they can’t believe this “peasant-looking woman” could afford a Dior. This band of villains is led by Claudine Colbert, played by Isabelle Huppert. As one of the most complicated actresses in world cinema, it’s depressing to see her character with a raised nose. Huppert finds ways to add depth to a one-dimensional character, but mostly through a sorrel.
But Colbert is no match for Mrs. Harris, who the seamstresses and some wealthy customers take an immediate liking to. Since this is a fairy tale, conflicts are easily resolved. But it requires our heroine to stay in Paris for another week, where she falls in love with a wealthy widower and befriends some of Dior’s younger employees – Mrs. Harris teaches them old-fashioned ways of the world. Everyone learns a few life lessons, including our titular hero.
While romance abounds in the city of love, “Mrs. Harris” never loses focus on the true object of affection: those clothes. A special montage shows models on a sidewalk. Our Mrs. Harris reaches a level of manic euphoria as images come onto the screen in a way that suggests something of PG rated pornography.
Some may fret that a film centered around seams and fabrics is too materialistic. That the film equates a better way of life with a symbol of wealth.
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To that I say: Of course it is a symbol. The dress is a radiant ray of light in a sea of clouds. As Europe changed after the devastation of World War II, the question arose as to what the continent would look like once it was rebuilt. Would people’s lives return to normal? Culture and fashion naturally play a role in this.
When Ada goes to Dior’s house, she has to navigate through piles of garbage that have accumulated as a result of a garbage strike. That’s a powerful image. A working-class British woman walking through French rubbish as she heads to a designer clothing store.
Mrs. Harris may say it is her dream, fantasy or whatever, but the dress is an ideal of what the average person can expect in the uncertainties of the modern world.
There is also an interesting minor point in the third act of Mrs. Harris,” where Dior itself goes through an existential question: how to serve customers who expect goods to come to them, and not the other way around; something that seemed to contradict the experience of luxurious clothing.
Unfortunately, it’s just a side note, since “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” focuses more on the fantastical elements of its story. About the luck that befalls Ada just when the plot needs a jump start. There are many provocative ideas in the quest for the mythical dress – I haven’t mentioned how Mrs Harris’ social life is populated with West Indian immigrants – but one has to pay close attention to find them.
Manville struggles a bit in the lead role. She’s a great character actress; I couldn’t help but think of her performance in another fashionable film, Phantom Thread, while watching. Ada Harris doesn’t play to her strengths of exaggerating character idiosyncrasies.
Regardless, there’s an audience out there that “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is a beautiful escape. An audience that doesn’t care about clichés or tropes, but just wants to watch an average person transform into a more gorgeous person while maintaining their humility. The fact that better material is sacrificed in the process doesn’t bother her.
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” opens at Ragtag Cinema on Friday.
In real life, James Owen is an attorney and executive director of the Renew Missouri energy policy group. He created/wrote for Filmsnobs.com from 2001 to 2007 before spending a significant amount of time working as an on-air film critic for KY3, NBC’s Springfield affiliate. He was named one of the top 20 artists under 30 by The Kansas City Star when he was much younger than he is now.