Neither hambone nor underplayer, Lesley Manville gives tremendous value for the money. Her classical chops, coupled with a shrewd improviser’s wiles honed in the films of Mike Leigh, have elevated so many projects, among them Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” in which Manville played the impeccably coifed gatekeeper to Daniel Day-Lewis’s meticulous Pygmalion fantasies of what the well-dressed woman should wear.
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” allows Manville to be the one outside of the haute couture, looking in, and then striding right through the looking glass. This is the latest screen adaptation of the 1958 Paul Gallico novel, about a humble London war widow getting by as a charwoman (though I don’t believe the new film calls her that). Ada Harris dreams of luxury, for once, before it’s too late. Her story is a daydream made real, about traveling to the home of the House of Dior and coming home with something nice.
Manville and her fellow actors ensure that the film certainly is that. Its niceness is all, even when director and co-writer Anthony Fabian foists a vaguely bullying charm onto the storytelling. The adaptation stays pretty faithful to Gallico’s original, though Harris herself has evolved in different directions.
