“She may be weary
Women do get weary
Wearing the same shabby dress …”

Count Mrs. Ava Harris (Lesley Manville), hard-working and underpaid London charwoman, among those weary women, envisioning something more uplifting than the “same shabby dress.” Cleaning the homes of her clients, she sees what couture has to offer and aspires to such loveliness for herself. I was more than a little doubtful about this film—it sounded much too fluffy for me, but . . . it was fun!

If you’ve seen previews for the movie, based on a novel by Paul Gallico, and directed by Anthony Fabian (trailer), you’ll have a pretty good idea of what happens, up to a point. Mrs. Harris’s husband died in World War II, which the military finally acknowledges some years later. The windfall of a delayed pension will let her travel to the Dior atelier in Paris and buy the dress of her dreams.

The uptight woman managing Dior (Isabelle Huppert) doesn’t want to give Ava the time of day, but the young people on staff take to her unassuming manner, and a gentleman offers himself as her companion for the viewing of the Dior’s tenth anniversary collection. You know she’s going to get a dress, some way or another, but how that’s accomplished is delightful.

A perfect, frothy, summer movie. And you get to see a lot of elegant dresses, something I thought The Phantom Thread (2017)(also with Lesley Manville as Daniel Day-Lewis’s sister) shortchanged, whereas PBS’s series The Collection did not. Don’t think too hard. Just sit back and enjoy.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 94%; audiences 93%.