Paul Gallico’s intergenerational popular novel about his most famous character: the down-to-earth, kind, old-fashioned working class cockney charwoman, Mrs ‘Arris and her trip to Paris in the 1950s to buy her once-in-a-lifetime dream frock from the House of Dior, may seem an oddly dated choice for a film adaptation in 2022.
It’s a story about a dream that’s no longer a dream in the globalised world of mass-market high fashion. It offers a romantic vision of a Paris that’s not much like it was in the 1950s and a “be polite, kind, keep calm and carry on” idea of Englishness that doesn’t compute for most people in these post-Brexit, dunderheaded Tory-directed, absurdist bad joke that is real life on the scepter’d isle these days.
Director Anthony Fabian grew up partly in Paris and London so he felt he had the necessary experiences to bring Gallico’s story to the screen. He was also aware that the novel might be too much of its time for the tastes of some. He says he discovered through the process of adapting the book that tempting though it may have been to update to the present day it wouldn’t have worked.
“We live in a world of globalised brands and you no longer have to go to Paris to buy a dress that’s made in Paris. There are many fashion houses vying to be called 'king of fashion' or whatever it might be, whereas in the 1950s Dior really was king. For those reasons I felt it had to be set in its original period.”
Nevertheless, Fabian felt there were tweaks he could make to some of the elements of Gallico’s original to bring it into the modern era. He made the character of Ada’s best friend Violet — also a cockney charwoman — Jamaican. He says: “In the 1950s we had the Windrush, which brought a lot of Jamaicans to the UK for work and for a better life. So without disrespect or anachronism I turned her into a Jamaican character.”
Likewise the Dior models who appear as the film’s centrepiece fashion show are of diverse ethnicities, not so much because of a desire on Fabian’s part to modernise or nod to our desire for representation but to reflect a historical reality.
“There were diverse models at Christian Dior, we just didn’t see them; we didn’t know about them; we didn’t know about people like Vi,” says Fabian. “These slight changes are about showing history that was previously invisible and making it visible in telling this story. That was one of the ways we were able to modernise the story but remain true to the period.”
It also became clear to Fabian that a period-faithful adaptation would be best served by the participation of the House of Dior, which in 1957 when the book was published, was the centre of the fashion world — a decade after the designer had revolutionised women’s fashion with the introduction of his “new look”.
Fortunately for Fabian, Dior did realise that the story was part of its history. “They’re very proud of their history and heritage,” says Fabian “But as long as we held up our end of the bargain and had people of sufficient quality working on the film like Lesley Manville and Jenny Beavan — the costume designer — they were willing to support the film.”
Dior had initially agreed to make all the film’s couture but after Covid and the panic it induced about the future of fashion houses it was up to Beavan and her team to design most of the iconic dresses themselves in record time. Their creations are now some of the standout “stars” of the film.
Fabian knew that to get funders and audiences on board he’d need to have a memorable Mrs Harris to carry it and, as luck would have it, he was able to cast veteran British stage and TV star Manville, whose star was finally on the rise after the success of her Oscar-nominated role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s much gloomier 1950s English fashion world drama Phantom Thread in 2017.
Says Fabian, “It’s an irony that you have to find the right actor at exactly the right point in their career. Lesley, who has an extraordinary career in theatre and television and even on film, hadn’t been offered a lead role in a film before; and a title role like this. She was hungry to do this film and I knew she had the capacity for it because I’d seen her extraordinary performances over the years.”
Audiences and critics have responded enthusiastically to Manville’s performance and Fabian’s charming realisation of the story of Ada Harris and her trip to Paris, with many finding it the necessary piece of old-fashioned escapism they’ve needed in the wake of the uncertainties and restrictions of the pandemic. It’s also an indication of what Fabian hopes is the universality of the film’s central message: that it’s never too late to fulfil your dreams.
“We’re a youth-oriented society; we’re a 'I want it now' society. A story that talks about achieving a dream later in life is special and inspiring for audiences.”
• ‘Mrs Harris Goes to Paris’ is on circuit.
