Anthony Fabian (2022)

It’s maybe the most irritating film title of the year but less irritating than the title of the source material, a 1958 Paul Gallico novel, which drops the lead character’s aitch to make clear she’s working class[1].  Twelve years after the end of World War II, Ada Harris (Lesley Manville), a Cockney cleaning lady, still hopes against hope that her beloved husband, missing in action, will come home.  He doesn’t but a different RAF officer (Freddie Fox) pays Ada a call:  he informs her she’s due a tidy sum for the war widow’s pension that she qualified for years ago but has never received.  While cleaning at the home of Lady Dant (Anna Chancellor), Ada falls in love with the Dior dress hanging in milady’s wardrobe, decides she’d like one of her own and sets about boosting her newly-increased savings.  At the White City greyhounds with her friends, Violet (Ellen Thomas) and Archie (Jason Isaacs), she loses heavily on an animal called Haute Couture but Archie, a bookie who carries a (faintly lit) torch for Ada, recoups the losses when, on her behalf, he secretly backs a dog that comes in at a decent price.  Ada also wins money on the pools but still, and sadly, has to sell her late husband’s watch in order to afford the air fare to France.  She then sets off for Paris, cash in hand, to buy her gown.

The London scenes of Anthony Fabian’s film are, not unexpectedly, thoroughly nostalgic.  In the opening nighttime sequence, Ada, as she chatters to her absent husband, gazes into the Thames; suffused with light, Battersea Bridge and its environs look almost magical.  The dog stadium is clean and tidy, bereft of seedy vitality.  Except for the nobs and the entitled for whom Ada works – as well as Lady Dant, there’s aspiring starlet Pamela Penrose (Rose Williams) and Giles Newcombe (Christian McKay), a pinstriped lech – London is peopled by the salt of the earth.  The French capital is relatively surprising both in how it looks and what’s going on there.  When Ada arrives, there’s rubbish piled in the streets, thanks to a strike by refuse collectors protesting at the working conditions imposed by their boss, Avallon (Zsolt Páll), aka ‘the king of filth’.  Among those attending the unveiling of Dior’s tenth anniversary collection, Avallon’s wife (Guilaine Londez) is the most obnoxiously rude to Ada, although fashion director Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), a mixture of dragon and sycophant, runs her a close second.  But the charming Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson) takes an immediate shine to Ada and Dior’s accountant André (Lucas Bravo) is both pleasant and canny enough to treat her with respect.  World famous as it is, Dior is going through tough financial times:  a cash buyer, whatever her social status, isn’t to be sneezed at.  So, with Claudine’s reluctant agreement, a chosen dress from the new collection will be specially designed for the lowly English visitor.

Assuming Dior to be a posh version of Woolworth’s, Ada expected to make a purchase and return home.  With her time in Paris much extended, she accepts André’s invitation to stay in the spare room in his apartment.  Unlike its immaculate owner, the place is in a terrible mess so Ada promptly gets to work cleaning it up.  She also cooks dinner – toad in the ‘ole – for her host and his Dior colleague, Natasha (Alba Baptista), a rising-star fashion model.  The storyline of Mrs Harris, once the action crosses the Channel, is more bizarre and expansive than I guessed it would be.  Despite their lines of work, André and Natasha, being bright young continental things, share an interest in existentialist philosophy.  Ada takes afternoon tea with the widowed Marquis but what threatens to become an unlikely romance shudders to a halt when he inadvertently offends her.  The Marquis tells Ada he liked her instantly because she evoked distant memories of a cleaner at his English boarding school, affectionately known as  Mrs Mop.  The insult appears, weirdly, to radicalise the heroine.  When Claudine fires several staff to cut costs, Ada organises a strike by the rest of the Dior workforce.  She also successfully insists that the rarely seen Christian Dior (Philippe Bertin) hear André’s ideas for modernising the business and returning it to profit.  Not just a pretty face and an intellectual but an entrepreneur to boot, André reckons the future lies in off-the-peg garments as well as bespoke design for special clients:  a brief meeting with him is enough for Christian Dior to agree his proposals and immediately reinstate the fired staff.  On her subsequent return to London, Ada parts company with Lady Dant and tells her, ‘The days of treating people like scum and expecting loyalty are over’.

What the film’s trailer describes as Paul Gallico’s ‘beloved novel’ (of which I’d never heard) has been dramatised before:  in 1958, as an episode in the American television series Studio One, with Gracie Fields in the lead (as a Lancastrian Ada?); in 1992, as a TV movie starring Angela Lansbury, along with Omar Sharif and Diana Rigg.  Gallico wrote three more Mrs Harris novels – she also goes to New York, Parliament and Moscow – but if screen adaptations of his work are any guide, such repetition was a rarity.  I remember being taken by a TV adaptation of his short story The Snow Goose, shown on the BBC at Christmas 1971, then, barely a year later, astonished that he was also responsible for the novel that inspired The Poseidon Adventure (whose huge box-office success must have helped confirm the mid-1970s vogue for disaster movies).  Now, half a century later, this …

I don’t know whether Anthony Fabian and his co-writers, who include Olivia Hetreed (Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)), have departed from the original by introducing workers’ rights into the script (or in their account of the early post-war history of the Dior fashion house[2]).  If they have, it would be misleading to suggest they’ve ‘politicised’ the material in anything but a trivial way.  Perhaps the ethnicity of Ada’s pal Violet is different from in the book but that still makes her one of only two Black people in the film’s version of 1950s London (the other is played by Delroy Atkinson) – and that’s two more than there are in Paris, even among the street cleaners.  As Rael Jones’s music, perky and wonderstruck by turns, makes repeatedly clear, Fabian’s Mrs Harris is essentially feelgood fare.  André and Natasha may read Sartre but it doesn’t stop them ending up a sweet picture of young love, once tentative André finally declares his feelings for Natasha.  And whatever else may have been altered in taking Ada Harris from the page to the screen, the basic plot driver – her mission to buy the Dior dress – is clearly unchanged.  In the course of the film, several other characters say they don’t understand why she’s so determined to buy the dress; for much of the time, I was puzzled, too.  I think the answer’s meant to be that everyone must have their dream.

Mrs Harris is often enjoyable, courtesy of the cast.  As a haute couture story, it could hardly be more different from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread (2017) but Lesley Manville, outstanding in the latter, is wonderfully versatile – witness her recent run of television work in Mum (2016-19), the revival of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads (2020) and this summer’s Sherwood[3].  Ada Harris is a fundamentally condescending conception yet Manville plays her with empathy; she makes Ada more credible than Anthony Fabian has a right to expect.  The hints of reality she brings to the role sometimes get in the way of the film’s slipping down as easily as its makers may have wanted but Manville also makes Mrs Harris much less annoying than it ought to be.  Fabian’s other main assets are in Paris – Lucas Bravo, Alba Baptista and Lambert Wilson – though his big casting coup was clearly Isabelle Huppert.  Her Claudine is formidably tense and I sometimes wasn’t sure the tension was in the character rather than the performer:  Huppert, who doesn’t always handle her English dialogue easily, is rather too harsh.  Still, it’s worth waiting for the brief scene in which Ada calls at Claudine’s home.  The door is opened by someone very different from the severely groomed figure of Dior HQ:  wearing a wan housecoat and no make-up, Claudine, who has an invalid husband to support, is defeated and exhausted.  (The scene naturally calls to mind The Devil Wears Prada (2006)’s glimpse into the unhappy personal life of Meryl Streep’s fashion-editor martinet.)

Isabelle Huppert’s splendid transformation isn’t quite enough to show that Claudine has a well-concealed heart of gold but distance does lend enchantment to the film’s view of most of its French characters once Ada’s back in London.  Despite being offended by the Marquis, she seems happy enough to take delivery of the enormous bouquet of roses that he sends.  Her own incorrigible kindliness means that she lends her Dior gown to Pamela for a showbiz ‘event’ (the question of whether it would fit Pamela – answer no – is sensibly ignored).  Pamela stands too close to an open fire and the dress is ruined.  This gives even irrepressible Cockney sparrer Ada the blues but press coverage of Pamela’s flaming wardrobe malfunction reaches Paris, thus enabling the good to end happily and the bad unhappily.  The dress made for Ada was not her first choice in the anniversary collection:  the outrageous Mme Avallon claimed that, and exclusive rights to the design.  But, with her filthy husband now bankrupt and jailed on fraud charges, she can’t pay her bill or claim the dress:  Ada’s Dior friends, after learning what happened to the gown she bought, send her the one she really always wanted.  She wears it to a British Legion dance at Battersea town hall.  Thanks to the persistent prettifying of London by Anthony Fabian and his cinematographer, Felix Wiedemann, the outfit doesn’t look as out of place in these surroundings as it should but never mind.  It takes a heart harder than mine not to enjoy seeing Lesley Manville’s Ada as belle of the ball, when she and Archie take to the floor.

20 October 2022

[1] Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris was actually the book’s American title.  It was published in Britain as Flowers for Mrs Harris.

[2] Wikipedia claims that Dior established ‘”a luxury ready-to-wear house … in New York …, the first of its kind,” in 1948.  … By the end of [1949], Dior fashions made up 75% of Paris’s fashion exports and 5% of France’s total export revenue. …  In 1950, Jacques Rouët, the general manager of Dior Ltd, devised a licensing program to place the now-renowned name of “Christian Dior” visibly on a variety of luxury goods … neckties …hosiery, furs, hats, gloves, handbags, jewelry, lingerie, and scarves’.  Paul Gallico’s novel was actually published shortly after Christian Dior’s death, at the age of fifty-two, in October 1957.

[3] Afternote:  And Manville’s portrait of Princess Margaret is one of the few bright spots in the latest series of Netflix’s The Crown.