Have you ever felt like you needed a great big cinematic hug?
You know why – the day has been terrible or you’ve had a fight with someone you really like or life just seems like a LOT, and all you want to do is to sink into a movie, in the mercifully uncomplicated dark of the theatre, and escape into a world where the uncompromisingly bleak rules of reality simply don’t apply.
If that’s you, or you simply want to feel good about life, the universe and everything again, then a trip to see Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris could be just what the existential doctor ordered.
Actually, screw the use of the word “could”; assuming your heart isn’t boarded-up block of concrete or simply M.I.A., you will walk out of the cinema after seeing the emotionally weighty confected delight, directed by Anthony Fabian to a screenplay co-written with Carroll Cartwright, Keith Thompson and Olivia Hetreed, feeling like you can decide to follow your dreams and good and gloriously uplifting things will happen.
This is not a film for the cynical or those who like their films drenched in black-and-white toned agonies about the great injustices of the world – nothing wrong with them, of course, but if you like them to the exclusion of all else, then it’s highly likely Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris won’t be your cup of happily down-to-earth tea – nor those who find fairytales insufferably twee and a laughable abrogation of the gritty realities of life.
No, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is the kind of film you go to because you want to believe that a cleaning lady from 1957 London can decide, after a lifetime cleaning the houses of the rich and the wannabe famous, and in effect, living vicariously through them, and over a decade mourning her husband who never returned from the war, to go to Paris to buy a Christian Dior gown and have her life fabulously transformed in ways that not even a fairy with a wand stacked full of glitter and a fistful of ancient incantations could manage.
In the third screen adaptation of Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris by Paul Gallico, published in 1958, Mrs. Harris, played with both aching vulnerability and fearlessly determined gumption by Lesley Manville, has had a mostly happily unremarkable life.
Life most people on the hamster wheel of the work-a-day world, she spends her days catching the bus with her best friend Vi Butterfield (Ellen Thomas), cleaning up after hilariously or annoyingly disconnected clients such self-obsessed aspirational actress Pamela (Rose Williams) or perpetually crying poor aristocrat Lady Dant (Anna Chancellor) who drops 500 Pounds on a Dior gown but begs off paying her cleaning bill, and wondering if her husband, who went M.I.A. back in 1944, might still be out there somewhere.
Her life is happy in its own way but it’s also smaller than someone with a heart and spirit as big as that of Mrs. Harris likely really wants to settle for, not that she has much choice since life’s incessant demands rarely leave time for fairytales to come alive, no matter how much we will them into being.
But when a series of events, all rendered in gently comical fashion that suggests a tilt to soft farce, conspire to give Mrs. Harris the money to buy a Dior gown and the funds to travel to Paris to get it, she doesn’t hesitate, setting off with the unconscious enthusiasm of someone who has a dream and sees no reason why it should not be unfulfilled.
As you might expect in a story like this and the rarefied part of Paris which Dior and its well-heeled clients live on another seemingly untroubled plane of existence, she almost immediately encounters fierce resistance, not least from the woman in charge of the then-ailing company Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) who sees Mrs. Harris’s unaffected dream-making as an affront to her idea of what is good and proper.
But for all the Claudines, there is André Fauvel (Lucas Bravo), Dior’s accountant with as-yet unlistened-to grand plans for returning the company to profitability, the model face of the haute couture house Natasha (Alba Baptista) who simply wants to read books about French philosophy, and Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson), one of Dior’s valued customers who still attends fashion showings even after the death of his beloved wife.
It’s these wonderful people, who champion Ms. Harris and her fearless dream of owning a gown from the House of Dior, who form the heart and soul chorus of a film that celebrates following your dreams as a holy mantra and Mrs. Harris as the high priestess of making it all happen.
The beating heart of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is, of course, our beloved cleaning lady whose infectious need to make her dreams come true come what may powers this fairytale through all kinds of frothily lovely contrivance.
The thing to remember every step of the way through this gem of a movie, which blends humour and some intense emotional moments with garrulous ease, is that the very basis of the film is fairy floss-coated suspenion of belief.
Almost none of the giddily upbeat things that happen to Mrs. Harris would happen in real life, but then, that’s not the point of the film; Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is all about wish fulfillment, of clawing yourself out from under the crushing weight of banality, tax returns and daily commutes to experience over 115 blissfully uplifting minutes what it would feel like is life bended to your will, and not the other way around.
But, and this is important because it amplifies the enjoyment of the film a thousand-fold, what really elevates Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is the grounded, honest emotionality that infuses so much of the film, all of it brought to powerfully affecting life by Manville.
You cheer every last contrived narrative twist-and turn, each and every defying of the established order and way of doing things, and all of the impossibly too-good-to-be-true moments because Mrs. Harris comes from such an earnestly true and emotionally raw place.
She has dealt with a lot in her life, and yet she still has the power to dream, dead husband, terrible clients and barely scraping by life and all, and to not just believe but work to make real the fondest, most tightly and long-held whispers of a heart that still beats with luminous hope and possibility.
She is the unbeaten-down person many of us still wish we were, and it’s her belief, against the odds, power structures and calcified status quos, that fills Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris with a moving emotional truth that gives it a storytelling muscularity that burnishes the lighter, but no less important, fairytale elements.
It’s a rare thing to find an aspirational film of dream fulfilment and hope realised that isn’t just welcomingly soul-stirring but also emotionally meaty and moving too but Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is that movie, a gem of a tale that brings together sparklingly vibrant characters, a woman who might just find love but makes of her own life what she will first, a found family who rally around the idea that you rule destiny and not the other way around, and a reassuringly emphatic nod to the appealing notion that dreams are never too old to pursue and that you owe it to yourelf to do so because who knows where it will lead.
Well, if you believe Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, and after the terrible time we have universally had of it over the last few years, you really should, it will be somewhere good, very good indeed, and you will be glad that you, like our titular character, dared to dream, act on it and not let anyone get in your sweetly determined way.