Mrs. Mopps

I've never read the novel Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris, but I have watched the 1992 TV movie starring Angela Lansbury. It was charming and sweet like a fairy tale, though I'm told the ending was changed to be happier than the book. 

I don't normally care about fashion, much less luxury like Dior, but I did like Jenny Beavin's costumes for Cruella so I figured I would see the new Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris movie, if only to compare to Angela Lansbury. It is still a charming fairy tale, but there's a melancholy element too, as we see Ada Harris's normal life, missing her dead husband and being unfairly taken advantage of by her rich employers. The film also expands her working-class friends, adding the bookie Archie and some train station drunks. Anyway, all of the sudden Ada falls in love with a Dior dress and has to have one.

I can understand that sudden impulse. I myself usually dress in casual shirts and pants for comfort, yet I fell in love with Rachel Chu's blue tulle dress in Crazy Rich Asians. Sometimes you just want to own something glamorous even if you have no occasion to wear it. Mrs. Harris scrimps and saves for her own Dior dress, and even does some gambling based on what she thinks are signs from her late husband.

Once she gets to Paris, Ada discovers that there's a garbage worker's strike, and the movie is very class conscious. She makes friends with a gentlemanly Marquis at Dior's fashion house, who invites her to watch the show with him. (Such a lucky coincidence that Ada arrived at the exact time and day for the 10th anniversary showing.) She buys one of the dresses despite the skepticism of Dior's director Madame Colbert, then gets invited to stay for a week with the accountant Andre so she can be there for fittings. In a funny subplot, Ada encourages a romance between Andre and Natasha, and she has friendly visits with the Marquis, but there is a difference now. In Lansbury's version, Ada flirts a little with the Marquis, but at the same time it's like a platonic friendship, like Jessica Fletcher had with those recurring guys Dennis Stanton and Michael Haggerty; a not quite romance. She is happy and charmed when the Marquis calls her "Mrs. Mopps" after a servant who comforted him as a child. The name becomes an in-joke at Dior as well.

In the new film, though, Ada is disconcerted when the Marquis compares her to Mrs. Mopps. "That's all you see me as, a cleaning lady?" She had hoped, naively, that the Marquis would be a love interest, that all the signs from her dead husband were pointing her to a new romance, only to be disappointed. So that's considerably more melancholy than Lansbury's version, and the other subplot with the Marquis's daughter and grandchild is dropped. It's kind of sad that the meaning of the "Mrs. Mopps" nickname has been changed, though I can see why the film views it as condescending, underlining a class divide.

In any case, Ada soon moves on to caring about her other friends at Dior and cherishing the wonderful gown she has bought. She rallies the employees to demand change from Dior management, just like the garbage strike, and everyone loves her for it. She eventually she goes home with the dress and learns to stop letting her employers take advantage of her kindness. She's a new woman, and the ending is a blend of the book's sad disaster with Lansbury's happy ending. A nice balance. Somewhat sweet, but not too saccharine.