Credit must then be directed at Oscar-winning costume designer Jenny Beavan, whose Oscar-worthy outfits are so ravishing one can instantly see why Mrs Harris would feel so transported by a mere glance. She doesn’t want to social climb or to fall in love, she just wants that dress. There’s something brilliantly simple about what Mrs Harris wants and how she intends to get it, without the need to turn her or the film into something more unnecessarily complex and overstuffed. Even though the simplicity of the text essentially demands us to side with and root for Mrs Harris at all times, Manville makes what could have been an easy working class archetype feel like a genuine person, securing our upmost investment as she edges closer to securing her dream dress. She’s far, far too broad and over-emphatic, as if she’s starring in a laboured farce, ensuring her every move is big enough for those in the cheap seats to see and her wild, way-off instincts clash when up against Manville, who is note-perfect throughout. It’s strange, given how parody-level perfect Huppert should be for this role, just how misjudged and messy her performance is. But not everyone is quite as charmed and she gets an antagonist in the shape of, but who else, Isabelle Huppert as the snippy director of Dior. As Mrs Harris finds her way into the world of fashion, she befriends a handsome pair of twentysomethings who she plays cupid for (Emily in Paris’s Lucas Bravo and Portuguese actor Alba Baptista) and a potential love interest (Lambert Wilson). There’s slow progress and a number of setbacks that don’t exactly place the film in the realm of the real (it’s pure escapism throughout) but makes her arrival in France feel earned and at least vaguely tethered to some sense of logic. What’s initially refreshing, and that much more involving, is that despite the somewhat fantastical nature of her quest, the script, based on Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel Flowers for Mrs Harris, refuses to make things easy for her.
But when she sees a Dior dress in one of her regular client’s bedrooms, she falls in love and sets her mind on travelling to Paris to get one herself. Her Mrs Harris is a warm, hard-working cleaning lady in 1950s London, doggedly going from house to house, quietly tidying up after lives far more exciting and glamorous than hers.
While Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is far lighter fare and at times so light that it threatens to drift away, Manville is determined to keep it grounded, a deft balance of dramatic heft and comic levity that not many other actors could employ quite so seamlessly.
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