Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022)

PG for adorable swearing.  Heck, I don't even know if they swear.  It's all just cute nonsense.  I mean, Mrs. Harris calls people "Ducks".  "Ducks."  She names them something even more adorable than the creature that they're named after. Um, I guess you see some underwear because Mrs. Harris is cool with going to a burlesque show.  But it's a PG burlesque show.  Doesn't mean I'm going to show my kids that scene.  PG.

DIRECTOR: Anthony Fabian

What is wrong with me?  Fourth blog of the day is too many blogs for the day.  It's all becoming a blur.  I have pierced the veil and I can taste color right now.  But I don't have time to write these otherwise.  Heck, even at this breakneck pace, I'm not going to knock out my to-do list.  But that doesn't mean that I don't chase that golden goose known as productivity.  I'm saying all this as a preface.  It's gonna get weird.  Do you know why?

It's because I loved Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. It makes no sense to me either.  As much as you might be reading this for insight for what was going on in my mind, I'm going to be discovering my reasoning in real time as I type.  Everything about this movie should be abhorrent to me.  But I think it comes from a desperate need of variety.  I'm getting sick of writing this (and if you are a long-time follower, you are probably sick of reading this), but the 2023 Academy Awards are mostly too long, too sexual, and too depressing.  Do you know what Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is?  None of those things.  The movie doesn't break the two-hour mark.  Mrs. Harris is an adorable pickle of a character.  It's PG.  I needed that.  After eating nonstop hamburgers, someone offers me a salad for a meal and my body screams that I need something chipper to make me happy again.  But that's almost being dismissive of a movie that I've been almost been nonstop recommending all week.  So let's break down why I like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris so much.

I can't deny that part of me has to chalk it up to expectations.  I heard so much trash about Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (and I didn't even know it was a remake!) that I was ready to power through this.  But Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris hits a very specific button that I'm a big fan of.  Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is a lighter Downton Abbey or a heavier Paddington.   I just gave Steven Spielberg nonsense for romanticizing his American childhood, but I'm somehow all for romanticizing an era in British history that didn't quite look like that.  I don't know what it is about that sweet spot in history that makes stories so compelling. (We all are laughing about Princess Margaret making a Princess Margaret joke, right?) There's something about the aesthetics about this era, post-war, that is somehow endearing.  I mean, The Crown put us in our places about the truth of this era.  But pre-War England was all about stuffed shirts and stiff upper lip.  The idea of the kitchen sink drama almost is something that America came up with.  I'm not talking literally.  That would make me a blasphemer.  But post-War England was about the common man overcoming one's station.  That's what Mrs. Harris is all about.

I mean, she's the archetype, isn't she?  (Now you Brits got me doing it!) Mrs. Harris almost exists as a cartoon character for us to aspire to.  If we're all arguing about late-stage Capitalism (and how it needs to be crushed underfoot!), Mrs. Harris doesn't have time for that.  She lives in this idealized world.  Sure, the man is keeping her down and making sure that she always has to work for a living (Oh man, when you put economics over any analysis, it instantly bums you out).  But Mrs. Harris doesn't worry about that.  She finds joy in the sunshine (oh man, I should hate this movie!) and in pretty dresses.  It's unfair that Mrs. Harris has to work for her entire life, but it also gives the dress a degree of value.  After all, Mrs. Harris discovers the Dior dress in the house of a rich and powerful woman, who appreciates it as much as any other possession in her home.  But when Mrs. Harris works for it, ah c'est magnifique! (Now you Francos have me doing it!  Not James or Dave, and I hate myself that I had to put that tag on it.) Honestly, the movie made me care about a dress and that's because we all have to accept that people don't get paid enough. 

But there is a certain degree of sticking it to the man.  Heck, most of the movie is sticking it to the man. I mean, it sticks it to the man in the most adorable way possible, which may be a form of anasthetic that big business wants me to have so I keep buying Christian Dior.  (What are all these thoughts I'm having?  I should buy something on Amazon to bury these feelings I keep feeling!)  Okay, it doesn't go for those deep cuts.  But everything about the movie is about how a working class woman should stay in her place and stop reaching above her station.  Sure, I should be rolling my eyes when I say that Mrs. Harris is there because she's got a certain spunk that doesn't allow her to be walked all over.  But for all my complaints about the balm that is given to the workers over things like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, maybe there's some affirmation that the world is a good place.  Yes, people suck harder than they should in the movie.  There has to be an antagonist, after all.  It is a story with a plot.  But Harris wins over every character, given enough time.  She also sees the dress for what it really is, which is somewhat uplifting.

All of this is culminated in Pamela Penrose.  Maybe this is a bit of boomer feed, but Penrose is the fear that the younger generation doesn't know the meaning of a solid day's work.  Okay, that's probably not great, but I also enjoyed the movie, so I'm going to try and poorly justify that I just like something.  Mrs. Harris is a good person throughout the film.  She often has setbacks where she's genuinely moved to tears, questioning her entire way of life.  After all, she did gamble away all of her savings on something fundamentally pretty dumb.  But through it all, she still stuck to her own moral code (That's why I like the movie!  I love epiphanies!).  She goes through these little gauntlets, most notably the fact that the romantic love interest in Paris treats her from a place of nostalgia as opposed to erotically.  (Yup.) But she is able to keep calm and carry on (Oh, I hate me so much), taking the newly acquired dress back home as a trophy of the greatest week in her life.  There's something sad and melancholy about it though, knowing that this moment is over and even it wasn't perfect.  It's when she loans out that dress to Penrose.

Now, that dress moment is telling.  She has seen the dress for what it was: an experience.  It doesn't matter that the dress is gorgeous.  What mattered was that she got what she set out for and that's the real victory.  Still, it hurts when Penrose sets fire to the dress.  It's not the action of setting fire to the dress.  It's the concept that Penrose couldn't even face the music when asked to return the dress to Harris.  But Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris doesn't want me to be sad.  I mean, I love sad endings.  But Mrs. Harris, she doesn't she.  Does she, ducks?  Anyway, in this grand statement that karma exists, everything works out.  Yeah, I should be mad about that.  But I think  it is because that's the rules of the movie that I'm not upset with that.  Mrs. Harris makes no moral mistakes.  She sacrifices as a character traits.  These moments where things get darkest reward her sacrifices and builds on them to an almost absurd level. Sure, that's probably not how the real world works out.  But sometimes I need the world to be a good place.

That's just it.  Sometimes I need the world to be a good place to good people.  It's all a fantasy.  Heck, for Mrs. Harris, it's a fantasy.  But that fantasy goes a long way with me sometimes.  I need to be able to say that the world is working the way it is supposed to work out there.  I want people to make friends in Paris and to step out of comfort zones.  Yeah, it's candy.  But it's really good candy, isn't it, Ducks?