MRS. HARRIS GOES TO PARIS

When I first saw the trailer for Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris - before a showing of Downton Abbey: A New Era -  I thought it looked quite offensively bad. Its portrayal of the working class looked clunky at best, Mrs Harris herself screeching “AH’VE BEEN SAVING ME PENNIES, SCRUBBIN’ THE FLOOOORS” setting up a working class aspiration story written by someone who has never met a member of the working class in their life.

In the year that followed Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris became something became something of a joke between us, but throughout all of these jokes, my friend Paige was adamant that we should watch it. And that we should watch it on a Sunday lunchtime, with a cup of tea.

Which is exactly what we did.

And this was the perfect way to watch it. Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is a Sunday afternoon film. If I had watched it on my own, one Friday evening, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. I probably wouldn’t have even made it to the end.

But sitting down with good friends, at this seemingly magical time of the week - where the laws of what is good and what is bad are blurred and no longer make sense - provided an entirely different experience.

Based on the book Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris (by Paul Gallico), Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris tells the story of a widowed cleaning lady Mrs. Harris (Lesley Manville), who, after seeing one of her rich (and in arrears with her wages) clients buy a £500 Dior Dress, becomes obsessed with the idea of owning one herself, and it that moment decided she is going to scrimp and save as much as she had to, so that one day she can take a trip to Paris and purchase one.

The costume design is the films main strength. Jenny Beaven has, quite rightly, won a BAFTA for her work on Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris and is up for an Oscar at next weekends 2023 Academy Awards.

As someone who knows very little about fashion (I’m currently writing this wearing a ten year-old Marks and Spencers jumper with a huge hole in the armpit) I’m perhaps not best placed to talk about this, but the fact I even noticed it is testament to the work that Jenny Beaven did. The costume design is traditionally one of the last things I pick up on in a film, but they do an excellent job here of showing why Mrs Harris becomes so enamoured with these dresses. Why she must have one of her own,

The set design is also worthy of praise. 1950’s London and Paris feel authentic (which considering it was shot in 2020 Budapest is quite an achievment!) and suitably different to each other.

London, still recovering from war that finished a decade prior, feels like a city struggling to find an identity. Putting on a brave face, but struggling to remember who it was before the devastation

Paris on the other hand, with its overt glamour, feels like a city with an identity that no longer works for it. Trying with all its might to convince the world that everything is OK, while the rubbish piles higher on the street corners, and the workers begin to revolt.

Where Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris excels visually, however, it flounders in its script.

It’s just not very good. And the fact it took four separate screen writers to get it to that level is a concern it itself. The characters are poorly drawn two dimensional cutouts of real people, and their motivations for the most part can fall into either “Working class good” or “Upper class bad” and are presented with all the subtlety - to borrow a phrase - of a reversing dump truck with no tires on (which judging by the state of the streets was an issue when Mrs. Harris went to Paris). While it’s not as offensively tone deaf as the likes of Bank of Dave it still does feel like a representation of the classes that has never actually existed in reality.

Most of these characters are introduced as nothing more than a plot device to move Mrs. Harris from one place to the next. When Mrs. Harris arrives in Paris she doesn’t know how to get to Dior, but as luck would have it the first person she meets is a kindly homeless man who agrees to take her there. Once there she isn’t allowed in, but panic not! There’s a man there for a fashion show who happens to have a spare ticket! In she goes. But now Mrs. Harris needs to stay in Paris for longer than anticipated? That’s alright, Vi (Ellen Thomas) will pick up her shifts, and, wouldn’t you just know it, the sister of Dior’s top accountant is away, and she would be happy for her to use her room and wear all of her clothes (because as it happens, this young, stylish, Parisian woman just happens to have the same physique has a 60-odd year old, English sexagenarian).

But, the truth is, as I sit here writing this, listening to the Soundtrack for inspiration, I find myself with nothing but fond memories of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. I found myself, while watching it, rooting for Mrs. Harris on her trip to Paris. How much of that is to do with the film, and how much is to do with the circumstances under which I watched it is debatable, but I had a really enjoyable time inhabiting its world.

It is not a perfect film by any stretch of the imagine, and my experience of it almost certainly comes down to right time, right place. It is evidence, however, if ever it were needed, of how ones enjoyment of a film is only partially down to the film itself. It is also down to what you, as an audience bring to it.