Everyone Deserves A Dior: Mrs Harris Goes To Paris
Want to see a diverse 1950s Britain? Paris New Look fashions? Jason Isaacs dance? Lucas Bravo playing against type as a shy intellectual and accountant? Plus Dior dresses?!!! Then this is your movie…
It’s a great story without being twee. Mrs Harris is a working-class cleaner, who spots a beautiful Dior dress in one of her client’s wardrobes and aspires to the same for herself. She starts saving, gambles wildly on the greyhounds, fails and is in the end saved by her deceased husband’s pay coming in, plus a widow’s pension. Off she goes to Paris — for one night only….and with help, tracks down Dior.
Isabelle Huppert is pretty sniffy, even when the customer produces cash, lots of cash from her handbag. Equally sniffy is Paris itself — the refuse workers are on strike and rubbish literally litters the streets in unmoved heaps. A kind widower, the gentlemanly Marquis de Chassagne is less classist and escorts Mrs Harris, (as his personal guest), to the catwalk display of the latest Dior dresses, helping her navigate the buying system. Naively she hasn’t reckoned with the haute couture system, in which a dress is made as a one off, fitted exactly to the client — and suddenly finds herself needing a week in Paris to get her dress fitted. Gazumped by the refuse worker’s boss’s wife to the dress of her dreams, she settles for another and dreams dreams in Paris.
Kindness pays because the hurrying Dior model she reunited with her lost bag convinces the Dior accounts manager Andre to lodge and feed Mrs Harris for the week, as well as providing tourist entertainment. Nastasha the model even gives a lift to Mrs Harris taking in the major tourist sites of Paris! The Marquis sends Mrs Harris exquisite roses and takes her to fine dining, dancing (and burlesque!) This causes Mrs Harris to be late for her next fitting, offending her dress creator — but again through kindness, (her interest in the wider Dior workers), and skill with a needle, she gets her dream dress creation back on track.
Meanwhile, whilst waiting for her dress to be finished, Mrs Harris inveigles herself into creating romance between Natasha and Andre. Natasha is a model with a brain — she wants to read and think great thoughts, not schlep from one social event to another as the face of Dior. He is a shy, thoughtful reader who also loves philosophy (and Natasha).
Thinking the rose sending Marquis is similarly romantically inclined, Mrs Harris enjoys his appreciation of all things English — until he reveals that she reminds him of a comforting English boarding school maid from his childhood. He just wants another cleaner in his life! Fleeing the situation abruptly, Mrs Harris grieves the loss of her loving husband — a World War Two pilot and porter at a Flower market, bringing her back treasured blooms. But soon she has her dress, her dream — but where to wear it?!!! Who will see it?
One of Mrs Harris’s clients is an actress who is always in messy crisis. Kindly Mrs Harris loans her the Dior to wear to a potential casting evening. Only disaster strikes — destroying the dress and making the actress famous for all the wrong reasons. Bizarrely Mrs Harris then chucks the dress in the River Thames. Surely as a working woman with gumption she would have retrieved some of the unburnt precious material, sequins and tried to do something with it, or atleast sell it for rags? It isn’t until her dear friends, Vi (a fellow cleaner) and Archie (Jason Isaacs) literally break and enter to check on her that Mrs Harris comes to her senses.
In the meantime, a mysterious box and some delicious roses arrive in the post….
It’s a really charming, story driven film. Wonderfully set in post-World War Two Britain, a time of Calypso and the beginnings of the Windrush generation. Vi (as an British-Caribbean woman, Ellen Thomas) is beautifully conceived — as is the bus conductor we encounter. Best of all, Vi isn’t a bystander, but gets her own romance at the end! I love the fact that the best friend was not left out of the fun. She is the supporter and encourager, and there are hints of racism as Vi sits alone on the bus (or not — maybe she was keeping the seat for Mrs Harris). But also of indomitable Windrush survivor and thriver spirit. She encourages Mrs Harris to keep going, to come out to the club (working man’s), to live a little, to be seen and embrace life again. This is a celebration of multi-cultural London life.
Jason Isaacs has a great against type role too — an Irish bookie who similarly dreams dreams and looks for love, through dancing and charm. It is also a reminder that the past is a different country — here working-class life revolves around drinking and dancing at the club (the Legion), sociability, working and saving hard and a flutter at the greyhounds (which was a glamourous social evening as much as horse racing during the day). What we don’t see is the bomb craters and post-war reconstruction in either Paris or London or the continuing rationing, so it’s hard to tell when this is set — maybe later 1950s-early 1960s? (Although to Mrs Harris and Vi World War Two is still a vivid recent memory — they even met during the war as factory workers doing their bit for the war effort).
Love and dancing overcome adversity — a fashion model can become a philosophy student; an accounts manager can dare to dream impossible dreams, and a cleaner can have the dress of dreams. Very for our times, strikes can be effective — the bin men win, Mrs Harris wins — stopping Dior sacking workers as Andre pitches his idea for branded ready-to-wear for ordinary people, and even the snobbish Isabelle Huppert’s front of house Claudine is reconciled into not leaving as Mrs Harris persuades her to return with her expert knowledge to keep the firm on task. Beautifully character driven (Lambert Wilson, Lucas Bravo, Alba Baptista all have wonderful moments — no one is quite what they appear to be!) And equally brava to Lesley Manville proving that older women and older women’s bodies can be beautiful, even if they’re not perfect!
