John Paul Sartre defined bad faith, mauvaise foi, partly as the difference between the identity one projects to the world and what one actually is. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris exhibits this inauthenticity by including signifiers for the class struggle and the fight for self-determination when it is actually just a film where a nice lady has nice things happen to her. So, am I going overboard by applying existentialist philosophy to a simple, nice movie? No, because Mrs. Harris wants to be about Sartre, too.
In the late 1950’s, Mrs. Harris, a London cleaning woman who lost her husband in the war, in enraptured by a Christian Dior dress she sees at the house of one of her clients. She embraces a quest to travel to Paris and buy a haute couture dress for herself, despite her working class friends protests that she should be simply satisfied with a pint at the pub after a long day toiling for others. But they are soon won over by her romanticism and determination, and off to Paris she goes on her own. This will be a recurring event in the movie, where everyone from street drunks to fashion house doyennes are won over by Mrs. Harris because she is just so darn genuine and nice. Mrs. Harris continues to Gump her way into improbable situations, and then resolve with her unassuming pleasantness.
Now, another great philosopher, Roger Ebert, said that you shouldn’t judge a movie by what you wish it was about, but by what the movie is trying to accomplish. Maybe we should cut Mrs. Harris some slack for being a simple crowd-pleaser. But, no, the movie introduces deeper conflicts and then fails to resolve them in any meaningful way. Mrs. Harris’ adventures with the House of Dior take place against the backstop of a Paris garbage strike, representing the underclass of which Mrs. Harris is a member rebelling against their positions cleaning up after high society. We are shown the workers of the fashion industry as cogs subservient to each larger cog above them. And we have a Sartre-reading fashion model who is valued for her beauty, but seeks fulfillment for her mind. All of these elements, and Mrs. Harris’ journey itself reflect Sartre’s concerns with the roles defined for us in society in opposition to the definitions we create for our true selves. Rather than experiencing the anguish described by Sartre, however, these people just need to follow Mrs. Harris’ example of standing up for themselves, and everything will work out just fine. We even get a line where she tells the boy regarding the girl, “Just kiss her already,” and, voila, the existential angst of two people is dispelled.
To be fair, we do get a couple of poignant scenes where Mrs. Harris has to sacrifice some happiness for her dignity and where she loses something for her kindness. But the movie could have used many more of those scenes if it was to be the film it wants to be. Instead we have many scenes of crisis followed by dawn with very little in growth of the characters to pave that path.
Maybe that’s the kind of movie you want. The couple sitting next to me (who didn’t seem to realize they weren’t in their living room) certainly enjoyed this dynamic. They continually cried out “Oh my God. No!” with each setback and “Oh my God. Yes!” with each resolution, and hopefully predicted aloud each development to move Mrs. Harris along her path to self-actualization. This movie is primarily that type of comfort food, and if that is what you are after, no judgements if you rush out to see it. I just hoped for more.
Lesley Manville as Mrs. Harris is good with what she has to work with. The dresses and fashion in the film are all shot lovingly, but with a backdrop of Paris in the 1950’s, the film really fails to show off much more than the dresses and one fun nightclub scene, when it could have transported us to a different era. There’s also a couple of fun songs used on the soundtrack. But the acting, fashion, music, and scenery wasn’t enough to overcome the bad faith of the merely nice story.
Das Fressen 