, Mrs. Harris does, in fact, go to Paris. In that sense, director’s adaptation of the Paul Gallico novel entirely fulfills its promise. The honesty of its title is not the film’s only virtue, though. Fabian has made a nice little movie filled with the kind of wistful whimsy we so often crave of period British films—a pip-pip moxie that is, for all its chipper good cheer, not ignorant of the sadder stuff of life.plays the titular role, a London housecleaner who has lost a sense of herself.
When Ada finally receives word that her beloved is actually dead, she is both freed and unmoored. There’s a bit of war widow money to be collected and that, coupled with a lucky turn at a kind of local lottery, gives Ada a wild notion that takes firm root in her mind: she’s going to make her way to Paris to buy a custom Dior dress, one quite like the one so blithely owned by her wealthiest client.
There is no deep meaning to this dress. Ada is not a repressed fashionista; there isn’t some dead relative who had their own Dior frock that Ada pines for. She just wants something special in her life, something she’s earned by dint of hard work and, sure, the everyday luck of being around in the world for long enough. Manville shrewdly draws a working class hero who is neither supernaturally good nor saintly in her humble penury.