We’ll always have Paris. But maybe not Mrs Harris: BRIAN VINER reviews Mrs Harris Goes To Paris
Mrs Harris Goes To Paris
(PG, 115 mins)
Verdict: A half-risen souffle
Rating: ***
Smile
(18, 115 mins)
Verdict: Horror with teeth
Rating: ****
On paper, the story of Mrs Harris Goes To Paris is an absolute charmer. Indeed, it started out on paper, as a 1958 novel by the American writer Paul Gallico, entitled Flowers For Mrs Harris.
On screen, however, it charms only intermittently, Lesley Manville notwithstanding. She is a delight in the title role, and anyone who saw the captivating Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread (2017) will marvel anew at her versatility.
That picture was about haute couture in the 1950s, and so is this one, but in Phantom Thread Manville’s character was at the centre of that rarefied world looking out. Here, as widowed Ada Harris, a domestic cleaner, what used to be called a charwoman, she is on the outside looking in.
First, Ada falls in love with a £500 Christian Dior dress. Then, she resolves to scrimp, save and even gamble until she can afford one. A series of unexpected and highly contrived windfalls later, she catches a flight to Paris and makes her uncertain way to the House of Dior, although even with a fistful of cash she is treated snootily by the starchy ‘directrice’, Madame Colbert, played in only one dimension by Isabelle Huppert.
Lesley Manville is a delight in the title role of Mrs Harris (centre)
Several of the supporting characters threaten to pull this film apart at the seams, a weakness not of the acting but of the writing and direction. It is a great shame.
Even in a fairy tale, which is really what director and co-writer Anthony Fabian is giving us, background characters need to feel like flesh and blood. But at least a couple of others, notably the imperious Lady Dant (Anna Chancellor) and aspiring actress Pamela Penrose (Rose Williams), are little more than cardboard cut-outs, propped up by the plot.
Still, we’ll always have Paris, not to mention Mrs Harris, who sets out from her Battersea basement every day to clean the homes of the wealthy.
Lady Dant has a new Dior frock — ‘when I put it on, nothing else matters,’ she declares — and Ada fancies some of the same. But how, in 1957 London, can she get her nimble, industrious but ineffably working-class hands on £500? Her pals, West Indian cleaner Vi (Ellen Thomas) and twinkly Ulsterman bookie (Jason Isaacs), think she’s ‘barmy’. Nevertheless, those fairy tale contrivances make her dream come true, and off she goes, dazzling the City of Light itself with her sweet affability and funny English sayings.
Classic film on TV
The Ipcress File (1965)
The good folk at ITV did their best with the recent serialised version, but nothing can beat Michael Caine making his debut as Harry Palmer, the myopic spy conceived as the antithesis of James Bond. Wonderful stuff!
Sunday, BBC2, 2.05pm
Soon, she is charming the silk socks off an urbane aristocrat (Lambert Wilson) and acting as matchmaker to lovely model Natasha (Alba Baptista) and dishy accountant, Andre (Lucas Bravo, from the Netflix hit Emily In Paris). She even helps to rescue Dior’s ailing financial fortunes, and along the way proves herself a dab hand both at needlework and cooking (rustling up, almost inevitably, toad in the ‘ole, translated by her new Parisian friends as ‘frog in the ditch’).
I seem to recall from decades ago that not even the mighty John Thaw could overcome that kind of overripe Camembert cheesiness in the TV adaptation of A Year In Provence. But somehow or other, Manville pulls it off.
Incidentally, had the film been made at the time in which it is set, the cityscape would have been irresistible; the picture might have had a Roman Holiday quality.
As it is, modern-day Budapest stands in a little clumsily for 1950s Paris and, perhaps to compensate, Fabian dishes up period cliches like a heavy-handed waiter in a Montmartre brasserie (Jean-Paul Sartre, check. Edith Piaf, check).
Really, it is a half-risen souffle of a film. But its classy leading lady gives it substance. And, I should add, veteran English costume designer Jenny Beavan, already with three Oscars under her belt, has a ball.
Horror movie devotees will have one, too, when they go to see the excellent Smile. The simple human smile, like its evil cousin the maniacal grin, has an honourable place in the horror genre.
Parker Finn, making an auspicious directing debut, deploys it very skilfully as a hospital psychotherapist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), becomes terrorised by the image of a female patient, Laura (Caitlin Stasey), who died horribly in front of her wearing a rictus smile.
The inevitable jump-scares are deftly executed throughout, but what is especially clever about this film, which is also written by Finn, is the considered way it deals with mental health.
Rose is already haunted by her mother’s suicide years earlier, and without being as good, Smile owes a conspicuous debt to Ari Aster’s masterly Hereditary (2018).
You can’t always run from something that runs in the family.
For more reviews see dailymail.co.uk
Also showing…
Girls Girls Girls
(15, 100 mins)
Rating: ****
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
(12A, 126 mins)
Rating: **
Give or take a few punctuation marks, Girls Girls Girls was both a 1962 Elvis Presley film and a 1987 album by the American heavy-metal band Motley Crue.
But with due respect to fans of both Elvis and heavy metal, the best incarnation of the title might well be an engaging new Finnish drama about friendship, love and sex. Girls Girls Girls is very appealingly done.
Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen, left), Emma (Linnea Leino, centre) and Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff, right) in Girls Girls Girls
The story follows three girls in their late teens. Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) and Ronkko (Eleonoora Kauhanen) are best friends who work together at a Helsinki juice bar. Mimmi is gay, and falls for a third girl, Emma (Linnea Leino), who is a figure skater good enough to compete in the forthcoming European Championships.
But her skating prospects take a knock once she and Mimmi start dating. Meanwhile, the firmly heterosexual Ronkko is fretting about sex with boys, and wondering why it doesn’t seem to satisfy her.
All this is wrapped up with the friends’ relationships with their mothers, and although it’s standard coming-of-age fare, it’s extremely well acted, very wittily and credibly written, and nicely directed by Alli Haapasalo. A treat from start to, well, Finnish.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever is inspired by the true story of a merchant mariner from New York who, during the Vietnam War, decided to take a bagful of beer to his pals serving in the forces out there, as a show of solidarity.
It’s pretty corny but bowls along watchably enough. A better cast than the film deserves is led by Zac Efron, with small supporting roles for Russell Crowe and Bill Murray.
Girls Girls Girls is in cinemas. The Greatest Beer Run Ever is on Apple TV +
Night night, Nurse Ratched, you brilliant baddie
Louise Fletcher died this week, aged 88. She was never a household name, yet she won a richly-deserved Academy Award for her unforgettable performance as Nurse Ratched, the flint-hearted matron in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). For my money, Mildred Ratched is one of the greatest screen baddies, and Fletcher’s death has inspired me to list my top ten. Here they are in reverse order . . .
Louise Fletcher (right) died this week, aged 88. She was never a household name, yet she won a richly-deserved Academy Award for her unforgettable performance as Nurse Ratched (left)
10. Jack Wilson, Shane (1953). Westerns have yielded some of the most memorable screen baddies and I can’t think of a more forbidding one than Jack Palance’s ruthless gunslinger in George Stevens’ masterful Shane.
9. Bill Sikes, Oliver! (1968). I should think most people, in listing their scariest screen villains, turn to their childhoods. My own kids would pick Voldemort, every time. But I found Oliver Reed’s murderous bully more menacing than almost anyone.
8. Hans Landa, Inglourious Basterds (2009). There aren’t many more chilling opening scenes in cinematic history than the one that starts Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist war film, nor more chilling fiends than Christoph Waltz’s urbane SS officer.
7. The Wicked Witch Of The West, The Wizard Of Oz (1939). In real life, actress Margaret Hamilton was a Sunday school teacher, yet her most famous character cast a terrifying shadow over my own boyhood.
6. Shere Khan, The Jungle Book (1967). My children also tell me they’d pick Sid from Toy Story. But no animated baddie has ever captured my own imagination like this merciless Bengal tiger, gloriously voiced by George Sanders.
5. Hannibal Lecter, The Silence Of The Lambs (1991). Anthony Hopkins has accomplished so much in the cinema that it’s almost unfair for this to be considered his career-defining performance. But has any fictional character ever been more petrifying?
4. Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). I re-watched this a few nights ago, in honour of Louise Fletcher. She’s sensational, the more so because she makes vindictive, controlling Mildred seem so human.
3. Anton Chigurh, No Country For Old Men (2007). Javier Bardem was arguably the best Bond villain I’ve ever seen, in Skyfall (2012). But I’m not sure anyone will ever play a dead-eyed assassin better than he did in this classic thriller from the Coen brothers.
2. The Child Catcher, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). Robert Helpmann was a great choreographer and brought joy to many, but I bet he scared the wits out of even more, as surely the most sinister, spine-chilling character ever to feature in a children’s film.
1. Norman Bates, Psycho (1960). For my money the creepiest screen baddie of them all, superbly played by Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock’s masterpiece. Never mind Darth Vader and all the fantasy film villains. This felt like the real thing.
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