115 min | PG | July 15, 2022 | Focus Features
A London charwoman falls in love with a Christian Dior gown and decides she will own one. She scrubs floors, hoards her shillings, and books passage to Paris to buy couture she has no business affording. The fairy tale knows exactly what it is, and it commits.
Ada Harris cleans the homes of wealthy Londoners in the 1950s. She is a widow who irons other people’s linens and waits for a war pension that never comes. One day she sees a Christian Dior gown hanging in a client’s bedroom and decides she will own one herself. She saves, scrimps, and gambles her way to the fare, then travels to Paris to buy couture from the House of Dior in person. Anthony Fabian’s film is a fairy tale about a working woman who refuses to accept that beauty belongs only to the rich. The real subject is dignity and the small insistence that an invisible person deserves to be seen.
Lesley Manville plays Ada with warmth and a spine of iron. She refuses to make Ada a victim or a saint. She plays a woman who knows her own worth and expects everyone else to catch up. Isabelle Huppert plays Claudine Colbert, the Dior directrice who treats Ada as an intruder in her temple. Huppert keeps the snobbery brittle and human rather than cartoonish. Lambert Wilson plays the Marquis de Chassagne with old-world courtliness, and Lucas Bravo plays the young accountant André Fauvel as a man drowning in ledgers until Ada nudges him toward Alba Baptista’s restless model Natasha.
Fabian directs from a script he wrote with Carroll Cartwright, Olivia Hetreed, and Keith Thompson, adapting Paul Gallico’s novel. The film builds its argument through color. London is all grey stone, soot, and brown overcoats. Paris arrives in saturated bloom, and the Dior atelier becomes a cathedral of cream walls and jewel-toned fabric. The costume work carries the showroom sequence, where each gown is announced like a character and the camera lingers on pleats and beadwork. The contrast says everything the dialogue does not need to say about what Ada is reaching for.
Every beat of this story is visible from the opening reel. Ada will charm the people who dismiss her, the snobs will soften, and the dress will mean more than the dress. The film knows this and does not pretend otherwise. It works because Manville commits to Ada without a trace of condescension and because Fabian trusts sweetness without drowning it in sugar. This is a modest, sincere picture that wants you to feel good and earns the feeling honestly. It asks for nothing more than your affection and gives a fair return.