Film Review: Mrs Harris Goes to Paris upends fashion and fairytales

"A socialist revolutionary Cinderella who beguiles the Marquis de Chassagne with her homespun wisdom, Ada has the potential to be a delightfully satiric character..."

Lesley Manville goes to the ball in Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris

• Mrs Harris Goes to Paris 
• ★★★☆☆

You too, Mrs Harris, shall go to the ball. Opening in London in 1957, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (PG) stars Lesley Manville as Ada Harris, a Battersea cleaning lady whose life is turned upside-down when she sees her first Dior creation in the flesh.

Shocked out of her mundane routine after her husband’s death in WWII is belatedly confirmed, Ada sets out for Paris clutching her wad of hard-earned savings, determined to return wearing the finest haute couture.

Adapted by Anthony Fabian and Carroll Cartwright from Paul Gallico’s novel, with Fabian directing, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is a distinctly improbable affair (to be fair, we’re told early on that the House of Dior is ‘a place of dreams and fairytales’). 

That said, Ada Harris is no conventionally helpless princess: a hardworking woman who knows the value of her labour, Ada isn’t above inciting her fellow proletarians to march out on strike (not that the French need much by way of encouragement), and her no-nonsense approach to the business of buying a Dior cuts a swathe through the self-aggrandising world of Parisian fashion, which prides itself on its ‘elegance, decadence and savoir-faire.’

A socialist revolutionary Cinderella who beguiles the Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson) with her homespun wisdom, Ada has the potential to be a delightfully satiric character as she punctures the Parisians’ bourgeois sense of self-importance, but the film spends far too much time on a sub-plot about a burgeoning romance between the Sartre-reading model Natasha (Alba Baptista) and the soulful philosopher-accountant André (Lucas Bravo), whose conversations about existentialism are every bit as mortifyingly stilted as you might imagine. 

Those issues tend to melt away when Lesley Manville takes centre-stage, however, and it’s difficult to resist her unassuming portrayal of a woman who is both Cinderella and her very own Fairy Godmother.

(cinema release)