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Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris Movie Review

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a 2022 historical drama film directed by Anthony Fabian and starring Lesley Manville. It’s a highly implausible, silly fairy tale.

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“No cleaning up after no man for me“

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A widowed cleaning lady in 1950s London falls madly in love with a couture Dior dress, and decides that she must have one of her own. This is an extremely messy, odd movie that never really knows what it wants to be, and by the end of it we get some ideas of the movie’s message and drive, but that came way too late in the game to make a significant enough impact.

Lesley Manville is excellent as the titular heroine. She steals the show from everybody else in a tour de force performance full of charm and charisma. Others are all fine, but this is a one-woman show for the most part with the majority of supporting players falling to the backside.

My main issue with the movie’s first half was the immensely unlikable personality of this woman and a film’s message that seemed to state that personal happiness and wealth are the most important. She never even brought her best friend to Paris, which to me spelled selfishness and egotism of the worst kind.

The first half’s obsession with fashion and money was highly toxic that even the message at the very end that criticized those things did not manage to make this right as it came way too late. Also, the movie’s treatment of classism in Britain, though highly important to depict, was dealt with in a very unsubtle manner. And it was extremely hypocritical to shy away from showing racism in 1950s London while focusing so extensively on classism.

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Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, thus, walked an uneasy line between grounded drama and an utter fairy tale, never succeeding in any of those areas. Most of the scenes in Paris are also ridiculously contrived and the movie’s third act was overly cheerful and inspirational. It’s the type of old-fashioned storytelling that I actually don’t like as I never cared for these dramatic fairy tales. The movie also isn’t a comedy at all as none of it is any shape or form funny. The cinematography is vibrant and the score is pleasantly traditional, but even those technical aspects could not save the movie from feeling misplaced and chaotic.