A feelgood fairytale about a middle-aged woman, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is the kind of heartwarming, escapist celebration of the concept of shopping yourself happy that should be prescribed along with HRT patches. Unfortunately, undeniably likable as it is, for all its sparkly charm and mangled chunks of Sartrean philosophy, it’s just not especially good.
The incomparable Lesley Manville stars, giving a chirpy “cor lummy” performance that feels so far beneath her talents she practically needs a JCB to excavate down to it. She plays Ada Harris, a big-hearted cleaner from Battersea, south London, a character patchworked together from bits of Vera Drake and some jellied eels, who decides to follow her dream – of buying a couture gown from Dior’s atelier in Paris. There she encounters the frosty Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert, another criminally underused talent), the gatekeeper of taste who does her best to keep the hoi polloi at bay. Fortunately, Ada’s down-to-earth appeal disarms the rest of Paris. It’s unabashed froth, as substantial as a tulle skirt. And perhaps that’s exactly what we need right now.
