Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) may be a frothy fairy tale of a movie. Yet fairy tales are always stories of real human struggles.
Bruno Bettleheim famously writes in The Use of Enchantment: The Importance and Meaning of Fairy Tales, "The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...”
Ada Harris, adroitly played by Lesley Manville, is a romantic and slightly silly house cleaner who tidies up after ne'er-do-well gadabouts and penniless royals. She goes about 1950s London quietly cleaning up messes like one of the fairytale elves who clean in the night. A tiny, good-hearted soul, she's an aging Cinderella whose own Prince Charming never made it back from the war.
Then she sees a dress.
Now any woman will tell you--and men, as well, if they were perfectly honest about it--the right outfit has miraculous properties. We all instinctively understand the transformative power of clothes. That is why a mother's 4-year-old daughter traipses about the grocery store in her Spiderman regalia and unmatched shield in the midst of a Houston July. Clothing simultaneously shields and transfigures; protects and reconstructs. Indeed, Cindrella's ball gown was so transformative that no one, including her own stepmother, recognized her.
And Ada knows this when she sees an effervescent Christian Dior gown. This dress will transform her from invisible to radiant.
It is a tale for our ages: a story of a world clouded with toil, drudgery and filth can still bear dreams.
Yes, the world is ugly; it is hard and strewn with garbage. Yet, hovering just above the sewage are bastions of hope: ivory towers full of spun dreams sewn by the invisible, clinging to illusions not because they are blind but because they know how to make them real.
Beauty is no fairy tale; it is an aspiration. Beauty is not meant only for those who may buy it; it belongs to those who strive for it, dream of it and manifest it. Beauty is not limited to a class. Beauty is democratic; it is socialist; it is revolutionary.
No one knew this better than Sartre, when he wrote, "... beauty is neither an appearance nor a being, but a relationship: the transformation of being into appearance."
Indeed, from Homer to Shakespeare to Twain, all have said clothes can make the man.
The small, quiet, homely life of the simple little Ada can become beautiful.
