Drama
Mrs Harris Goes To Paris (PG)
Review: Post-wartime dreams come true in the shadow of the majestic Eiffel Tower in director Anthony Fabian’s life-affirming drama comedy adapted from Paul Gallico’s 1958 novel. Polished to a heart-warming lustre by four screenwriters, Mrs Harris Goes To Paris merrily trades in old-fashioned British pluck and charm, transplanting a kind-hearted cleaning lady from the streets of south London to the arrondissements of the French capital in the grip of a refuge collection strike. The resilient heroine’s dearest wish – to wear a Christian Dior dress to her local Royal British Legion’s forthcoming social – requires a nimble leap across class and language divides guarded by Isabelle Huppert’s snooty fashion house director, who mocks the idea of haute couture draped on someone like Mrs Harris. “You are nobody, invisible. How will you give this dress the life it deserves?” she chuckles.
Evidently, the grand dame hasn’t read Charles Perrault’s 17th-century take on Cinderella, Cendrillon Ou La Petite Pantoufle De Verre, or she would recognise that she is playing the wicked stepmother in a cleaning rags-to-riches fairytale and no amount of cruelty will prevent the title character from going to her ball at Battersea Town Hall. Oscar nominee Lesley Manville is delightful as a love-a-duck dreamer, whose innate kindness oils clunky plot wheels and guarantees a feelgood resolution that director Fabian gift wraps with impressive production design and costumes designed by Jenny Beavan in close collaboration with Dior.
Widowed cleaning lady Ada Harris (Manville) criss-crosses 1957 London with best friend Vi Butterfield (Ellen Thomas) to diligently dust and tidy the homes of cash-strapped aristocrat Lady Dant (Anna Chancellor) and struggling actress Pamela Penrose (Rose Williams). In the course of her duties, Ada fixates on Lady Dant’s £500 Christian Dior dress. A war widow’s pension and an unexpected windfall secure Ada an airplane ticket to Paris-Le Bourget Airport and she innocently gate-crashes the premiere of Dior’s 10th anniversary collection overseen by the couturier’s haughty director, Claudine Colbert (Huppert).
Times are tough for designer Dior (Philippe Bertin) so his team reluctantly accepts Ada’s rolls of cash in exchange for a one-of-a-kind creation that requires a series of fittings and an unexpected stay in Paris with accountant Andre Fauvel (Lucas Bravo). “You don’t get this hoo-ha when you buy a frock down Woolworths,” clucks Ada as she casts a spell over the ailing fashion house and its denizens including model Natasha (Alba Baptista) and widower Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson).
Like its exuberant title character, Mrs Harris Goes To Paris has no pretentions beyond delivering warm, comforting hugs between words of affirmation and empowerment. Parallel romantic subplots waltz to inevitable conclusions and Manville deftly navigates her hard grafter’s grief and gumption. Never underestimate a nobody.
Find Mrs Harris Goes To Paris in the cinemas
Horror
Smile (18)
Review: Curses are highly infectious in the horror genre, from the urban legend of a killer videotape in the Ring films to the invisible angel of death that stalks survivors of transportation tragedy in the Final Destination franchise. More recently in It Follows, writer-director David Robert Mitchell conjured a ghoulish manifestation that takes the form of family, friends or total strangers, and transmits between unfortunate souls through intimate physical contact: a delicious desecration of safe sex. Writer-director Parker Finn adopts a similar dramatic framework for his cheerfully titled supernatural horror, expanded from the award-winning 2020 short film Laura Hasn’t Slept.
Smile imagines a malevolent presence that feeds on trauma and automatically transfers to a witness of a victim’s gruesome demise. An arbitrary seven-day timeframe between deaths provides Finn’s waking nightmare with dramatic momentum, punctuated by a couple of decent jump scares and a discordant soundtrack composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer that sends chills down the spine. Woozy camerawork adds to our disorientation including clear nods to cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski’s exemplary work on Midsommar with not one but two recreations of the memorable upside-down driving shot.
Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) works in the emergency psychiatric unit of a busy hospital under Dr Morgan Desai (Kal Penn), tending to troubled patients including a new arrival, Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey). The grad student recently witnessed her university professor bludgeon himself to death with a hammer and has been admitted after a public disturbance. Laura tearfully confides that she is the only person who can see a pernicious threat, which takes on the form of other people. During a tense exchange, a rictus grin becomes affixed to Laura’s face as she forcibly takes one shard of a broken vase to her throat.
The suicide triggers memories of Rose’s troubled relationship with her mother (Dora Kiss) and she takes a week’s paid leave to recuperate with her therapist Dr Madeline Northcott (Robin Weigert). Unwisely, Rose probes Laura’s case with the help of ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner), who happens to work as a police detective and has easy access to crime scene photos of other victims. Convinced she will die within a week, Rose teeters on the brink of sleep-deprived madness, endangering her fiance Trevor (Jessie T Usher), sister Holly (Gillian Zinser), brother-in-law Greg (Nick Arapoglou) and their young son Jackson (Matthew Lamb).
Smile mines fear from a muscle contraction that traditionally conveys pleasure and approval, feelings that Finn’s picture works hard (and not always successfully) to earn. Make-up effects during the protracted final showdown are impressive but there’s a grim inevitability to the overall design with potential sequels in mind. Bacon’s nerve-jangling central performance is frequently more compelling that the film plodding around her, which could comfortably lop off chunks of the 115-minute running time.
Find Smile in the cinemas
