The Oscar nominee is on reliably excellent form in a sweet-natured Cinderella tale about a cleaner on a mission to buy a Dior dress
The Oscar nominee is on excellent form in a sweet-natured Cinderella tale about a cleaner on a mission to buy a Dior dressPhotograph: Liam Daniel/APPhotograph: Liam Daniel/APt’s been a reassuringly robust summer at the box office, records breaking here, there and everywhere , but sighs of relief from the industry haven’t been able to mask personal sighs of exhaustion, a not necessarily bad season but a largely unremarkable one.
While Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is far lighter fare and at times so light that it threatens to drift away, Manville is determined to keep it grounded, a deft balance of dramatic heft and comic levity that not many other actors could employ quite so seamlessly. Her Mrs Harris is a warm, hard-working cleaning lady in 1950s London, doggedly going from house to house, quietly tidying up after lives far more exciting and glamorous than hers.
What’s initially refreshing, and that much more involving, is that despite the somewhat fantastical nature of her quest, the script, based on Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel Flowers for Mrs Harris, refuses to make things easy for her. There’s slow progress and a number of setbacks that don’t exactly place the film in the realm of the real but makes her arrival in France feel earned and at least vaguely tethered to some sense of logic.
Director Anthony Fabian maximises a relatively meagre $13m budget, whisking us back to a modestly yet effectively realised recreation of 50s London and Paris, giving his film a cosy glow but with a bittersweet edge that prevents it all from fading into a puff of sugar. It’s an edge that cuts deepest in the last act which places Mrs Harris, and us, back in the real world, returning from a vacation to realise that the cruelty of life remains.
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is out in the US on 15 July, in the UK on 30 September, and in Australia on 20 October
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