MRS HARRIS GOES TO PARIS ★★★½
(PG) 116 minutes, cinemas.
Paul Gallico’s spirited Battersea charwoman Ada Harris had become a globetrotter by the time he finished his fourth book about her in 1974.
Lesley Manville stars as a Cockney cleaner who dreams of owning a Dior dress in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.
She’d been to New York and Moscow and in between she had become a British MP. But it was his 1958 novel, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, which first put her on the map. Hurdling the British and French class barriers, she takes off to Paris with five hundred pounds, her life savings, to buy a couture dress from Dior simply because she sees one in her snooty employer’s wardrobe and is struck by its beauty. When she succeeds in her quest, a working-class hero is born.
Anthony Fabian’s film about Mrs Harris is her third flirtation with the screen. Gracie Fields played her in a TV anthology series in 1958. Angela Lansbury was cast in another TV film 34 years later with Omar Sharif as the debonair Marquis who smooths her entry to the rarefied reaches of Dior’s showroom in the Avenue Montaigne. Now it’s Lesley Manville’s turn.
Manville is no stranger to the class system. For years, she was a regular in the films of Mike Leigh, a writer-director who made a particular study of class and how it operates. For him, she adjusted her accent many times to move up and down the scale, as well as portraying one or two characters who didn’t fit into the system at all.
Roxane Duran, Bertrand Poncet and Lesley Manville in Mrs Harris Goes to Paris.
Mrs Harris is a Cockney, a chirpy cliche who refuses to be defeated by anything, including the death of her beloved husband in World War II, and the meanness of her aristocratic employer Lady Dant (the reliably imperious Anna Chancellor), who can’t seem to scrape up the ready cash to pay her.
Her trip to Paris is an act of defiance, the dress a symbol of all she’s never had. And the Dior showroom and atelier become her education as she gets to know the seamstresses and others who make the place function. By the time she’s done, even Dior’s gatekeeper, the notoriously frosty Madame Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), has thawed out.
The script, by a team that includes Australian screenwriter Keith Thompson, is a relatively faithful translation of Gallico’s novel with a few alterations, some of which don’t quite come off. Ada’s friendship with her fellow charwoman, Vi Butterfield (Ellen Thomas), who has been transformed into a life-loving Jamaican, is drawn with a lot of humour and affection, but a sequence that has Ada rallying the seamstresses in a call for a pay rise is too perfunctory to convince.
There’s also a little too much syrup in Manville’s performance. Nonetheless, there’s grit, too, and the workings of the atelier and the pervasive reverence for the craftsmanship which goes into haut couture come through. The film’s designers spent a lot of time exploring the Dior archives and it shows. It’s Mrs Harris’s story, but it’s also a fond tribute to a world that has changed beyond recognition.
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris opens in cinemas on October 27.
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