We’ll always have Paris. But maybe not Mrs Harris...
Mrs Harris Goes To Paris
(PG, 115 mins)
Verdict: A half-risen souffle ★★★☆☆
Smile
(18, 115 mins)
Verdict: Horror with teeth ★★★★☆
ON PAPER, the story of Mrs Harris Goes To Paris is an absolute charmer. Indeed, it started out on paper, as a 1958 novel by the American writer Paul Gallico, entitled Flowers For Mrs Harris.
On screen, however, it charms only intermittently, Lesley Manville notwithstanding. She is a delight in the title role, and anyone who saw the captivating Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread (2017) will marvel anew at her versatility.
That picture was about haute couture in the 1950s, and so is this one, but in Phantom Thread Manville’s character was at the centre of that rarefied world looking out. Here, as widowed Ada Harris, a domestic cleaner, what used to be called a charwoman, she is on the outside looking in.
First, Ada falls in love with a £500 Christian Dior dress. Then, she resolves to scrimp, save and even gamble until she can afford one. A series of unexpected and highly contrived windfalls later, she catches a flight to Paris and makes her uncertain way to the House of Dior, although even with a fistful of cash she is treated snootily by the starchy ‘directrice’, Madame Colbert, played in only one dimension by Isabelle Huppert.
Several of the supporting characters threaten to pull this film apart at the seams, a weakness not of the acting but of the writing and direction. It is a great shame.
EvEN in a fairy tale, which is really what director and cowriter Anthony Fabian is giving us, background characters need to feel like flesh and blood. But at least a couple of others, notably the imperious Lady Dant (Anna Chancellor) and aspiring actress Pamela Penrose (Rose Williams), are little more than cardboard cut-outs, propped up by the plot.
Still, we’ll always have Paris, not to mention Mrs Harris, who sets out from her Battersea basement every day to clean the homes of the wealthy.
Lady Dant has a new Dior frock — ‘when I put it on, nothing else matters,’ she declares — and Ada fancies some of the same. But how, in 1957 London, can she get her nimble, industrious but ineffably working-class hands on £500? Her pals, West Indian cleaner vi (Ellen Thomas) and twinkly Ulsterman bookie (Jason Isaacs), think she’s ‘barmy’. Nevertheless, those fairy tale contrivances make her dream come true, and off she goes, dazzling the City of Light itself with her sweet affability and funny English sayings.
Soon, she is charming the silk socks off an urbane aristocrat (Lambert Wilson) and acting as matchmaker to lovely model Natasha (Alba Baptista) and dishy accountant, Andre (Lucas Bravo, from the Netflix hit Emily In Paris). She even helps to rescue Dior’s ailing financial fortunes, and along the way proves herself a dab hand both at needlework and cooking (rustling up, almost inevitably, toad in the ’ole, translated by her new Parisian friends as ‘frog in the ditch’).
I seem to recall from decades ago that not even the mighty John Thaw could overcome that kind of overripe Camembert cheesiness in the Tv adaptation of A Year In Provence. But somehow or other, Manville pulls it off.
Incidentally, had the film been made at the time in which it is set, the cityscape would have been irresistible; the picture might have had a Roman Holiday quality.
As it is, modern-day Budapest stands in a little clumsily for 1950s Paris and, perhaps to compensate, Fabian dishes up period cliches like a heavy-handed waiter in a Montmartre brasserie (Jean-Paul Sartre, check. Edith Piaf, check).
Really, it is a half-risen souffle of a film. But its classy leading lady gives it substance. And, I should add, veteran English costume designer Jenny Beavan, already with three Oscars under her belt, has a ball.
HORROR movie devotees will have one, too, when they go to see the excellent Smile. The simple human smile, like its evil cousin the maniacal grin, has an honourable place in the horror genre.
Parker Finn, making an auspicious directing debut, deploys it very skilfully as a hospital psychotherapist, Rose (Sosie Bacon), becomes terrorised by the image of a female patient, Laura (Caitlin Stasey), who died horribly in front of her wearing a rictus smile.
The inevitable jump-scares are deftly executed throughout, but what is especially clever about this film, which is also written by Finn, is the considered way it deals with mental health.
Rose is already haunted by her mother’s suicide years earlier, and without being as good, Smile owes a conspicuous debt to Ari Aster’s masterly Hereditary (2018).
You can’t always run from something that runs in the family.