Manville’s a well-judged joy, Monroe a misery marathon
Mrs Harris
Goes To Paris
Cert: PG, 1hr 55mins ★★★★★
Blonde
Cert: 16, 2hrs 46mins, also on Netflix ★★★★★
The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Cert: 15A, 2hrs 6mins
Also on Apple TV+ ★★★★★
A Bird Flew In Cert: 16, 1hr 31mins ★★★★★
Lesley Manville has already had one go at the world of haute couture on the big screen, earning herself an Oscar nomination for her fabulous supporting performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s immensely stylish but distinctly dark Phantom Thread.
Now she’s back in the world of high fashion again in the considerably more crowd-pleasing Mrs Harris Goes To Paris, playing a hard-working cleaning lady in the smoggy London of 1957 who falls in love with a Christian Dior dress and heads to the French capital to buy one.
The only problem is that it costs £500, almost £15,000 in today’s money.
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s based on a novel by Paul Gallico and has already been turned into a 1992 TV film starring Angela Lansbury and Diana Rigg.
Here the latter’s role, that of Dior’s haughty manager, is taken by the great Isabelle Huppert, whom you don’t often see playing second fiddle.
Directed by Anthony Fabian, this is an old-fashioned delight, taking in football pools, greyhound racing and dinner dances.
Manville is a well-judged joy, never lapsing into caricature but anchoring the kindly Ada in a familiar reality as we watch her first riding her luck to raise the money, and then overcoming Gallic snobbery as she attempts to make her New Look dreams come true.
Yes, it stretches the fab ric of credibility but this is gentle fantasy rather than hardhitting drama. If you liked The Duke, with Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, earlier this year but thought that there weren’t enough nice dresses in it, this is the film for you.
After a brief time in cinemas, Blonde, a semi-fictionalised version of the life of Marilyn Monroe adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates novel, arrives on Netflix, a platform far better suited (what with its pause button and all) to the film’s marathon running time.
while many will sit down and start to watch it, how many will make it to the inevitably tragic end? Goodness, this is an unpleasant piece of film-making, with New Zealand-born film-maker Andrew Dominik taking the central theme – that Monroe was serially abused by men in both her professional and personal life – and then laying that abuse before us in one very
‘Manville anchors the kindly Ada in a familiar, oldfashioned reality’
‘Many will sit down and start to watch it, but how many will make it to the end?’
long sweep of misery.
So don’t watch expecting Hollywood glitz and glamour. Instead, settle down to something that looks as if it was made for TV, featuring a game but not particularly convincing Ana de Armas as Monroe, and taking in scene after scene of rape, abuse, domestic violence, mental illness, miscarriage and a particularly misguided depiction of abortion. I could go on – Blonde certainly does.
Based on a true story, The Greatest Beer Run Ever begins in the New York of 1967, when the city – and, indeed, the country – was divided by the Vietnam War. To show his appreciation of their service, merchant seaman Chickie Donohue (played by a moustachioed Zac Efron) resolves to take a beer to every soldier from his neighbourhood who’s serving in Vietnam.
He boards a ship to Saigon and we’re off. This starts out feeling like a very American film made for a Stars-and-Stripes-waving audience.
But with Peter Farrelly directing and Russell Crowe contributing a small but important supporting performance as a cynical war correspondent, it soon deepens.
As the naive Chickie travels around Vietnam – sometimes hitch-hiking, sometimes passing himself off as a CIA agent – he discovers the full horror and complexity of what’s going on. There’s a great soundtrack too.
Despite being shot in arty black and white, and with a cast including Derek Jacobi and Sadie Frost, A Bird Flew In took too long to make it to our cinemas.
Essentially a Covid project, it sees the crew of a film trying to cope as lockdown hits and they have to stay at home. Indulgent, under-written and dated.