Mrs Harris Goes to Paris film review — Lesley Manville wears 1950s fashion role with panache

The last time film got mixed up with fashion, the result was Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. It was a bad movie that made everything look like trash. Mostly, of course, itself. But the industry became a laughing stock too, a racket run by and for idiots. The mockery felt odd. More than film snobs might admit, cinema and fashion aren’t always so very different. They both trade on our need to be spirited away by pricey illusions. Cue Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, a clumsily titled, smartly realised feelgood caper built on Lesley Manville’s crackerjack star turn, and a knowledge of how important frivolity can be.

Manville is cleaner Ada Harris, running a duster over postwar London. The character first appeared in Paul Gallico’s shaggily eventful 1958 source novel: Eliza Doolittle redrafted as her own Henry Higgins. The aesthetic owes less to Vogue than to a vintage picture book. London is all Routemaster buses, fog and the mansion flats our heroine makes sparkle. Until, in one, she chances on a glittering dress by Christian Dior. It is amour, à première vue to boot. The unlikely dream of owning one herself propels Ada all the way across the Channel.

Director Anthony Fabian has made a broad and cheery snowglobe of a film. Exactly how the happy ending will arrive is given a teasing question mark. That it will is not in doubt. It takes nous to make a movie this sweet without rotting your teeth, and to say so much with just the look of things. While the dog tracks and Battersea boozers of 1950s London are fondly portrayed, the city is also dowdy enough for the very idea of Paris to feel implausible. The boulevards appear as fantasy because, to Ada, they are.

At least to start with. Close-up, beauty is more complicated. A chilly greeting awaits at Dior, Manville confronted with Isabelle Huppert as the brittle directress of the house. The couture doesn’t lack hauteur.

Ada still gets to preview the collection, gasping at the satin and chiffon. Credit to costume designer Jenny Beavan, her long career showered with Oscars but still spent in a corner of the film industry often ignored by critics. But it is Manville who sells that wonderstruck gaze on which the movie depends: one that says that clothes are only clothes, but can also be a ticket to self-discovery for even the most grounded person. If Mrs Harris comes with a dash of the cartoonish, Manville makes her real. Some of that is pure technique. She also never once patronises the character. The film takes her lead. A sharp eye passes over money, class and business.

Déjà vu may creep in for those who recall Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. There Manville was cast opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in a tale of a fictional 1950s fashion house. The rhymes between the films make a fun Easter egg hunt, not least with Huppert taking the role of iron fist played first time round by Manville. The two actresses should work together again. Superheroes perhaps? But here the movie is Manville’s alone. If it ends up being generous PR for Dior (and really there is no “if” about it), the company owes her outfits for a lifetime.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from September 30