The last time we saw Lesley Manville in a fashion movie, she was playing the highly strung sister and business partner of Daniel Day-Lewis’s fastidious British couturier in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Now she returns in a very different fashion film set in very much the same era: the musty old 1950s, playing a chirpy London cleaning lady called Mrs Harris whose backdated war-widow pension kicks in at the same time as a win on the football pools (younger viewers may need to Google that), and she heads off to Paris with a big dream: to buy a beautiful Christian Dior gown.
Wide-eyed Mrs Harris finds herself initially looked down on with haughty Gallic astonishment by the fashion house’s formidable director of operations Mme Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), who has no great wish to be addressed as “ducks”. But Mrs Harris’s innate charm and innocence wins everyone over. It is adapted from the 1958 novel by Paul Gallico in which she was “Mrs ’Arris” in its original American title: a condescension that this film corrects.
