Hgh quality entertainment, with a memorable performance by Streep, but with some mixed messages about the fashion industry.
This film is glossy, funny, entertaining, and has some fine performances. However, some of the messages it sends are rather mixed and questionable.
Ivy League graduate, Andie (Hathaway), is desperate to become a journalist. Following a series of rejections, she is offered a job at NY Runway magazine, the leading global arbiter of women's fashion. She is appointed as junior PA to editor-in-chief, Miranda (Streep), meeting her notoriously demanding professional and domestic needs. Almost everyone in NY is afraid of Miranda's disapproval, and dropping her name enables Andie to get restaurant kitchens to open early for her favourite delicacies, or even to obtain a pre-publication copy of a children's book at three hours notice. Miranda phones at all hours of the day and night, and Andie comes running, knowing this is her foot in the door to the career she wants. Inevitably, her private life suffers.
However, Andie's hard work and ability pay off. She is soon able to anticipate most of Miranda's requirements. Her work also helps her makes connections with influential people in the literature and art worlds of New York, where her intellectual background means that she can talk the talk. She rises to be Miranda's senior PA and is invited to the main annual fashion event in Paris, where she also grows closer to handsome, successful writer Christian. She helps Miranda defend an attempted coup for her job, and holds her hand through some trying personal issues. However, she is shocked at Miranda's swift recovery from these blows, and begins to see the emptiness of her life, outside of editing the magazine.
At this point, with both of them wrapped in designer couture, chauffeured in a gleaming limousine, and surrounded by the beauties of Paris by night, Miranda makes a Mephistophelean proposition to Andie: continue to be at my right hand, and you may one day succeed to my job. She tells Andie that she sees in her the same killer instinct and dedication which took her to a career at the top, and hints that Andie has already shown that she is prepared to sacrifice her private life to get where she wants. Like Faust, Andie then has to decide whether to place worldly success above all else.
Streep is not stretched in playing what is essentially a two-dimensional pantomime villainess. Apart from the Mephistopelean moment, she has an earlier monologue about Andie's `cerulean' cardigan, clinically dismantling Andie's early skepticism about fashion. Her character has aspects of Kay Thompson in Funny Face (1956) and Glenn Close's Cruella Deville, whose look she somewhat resembles in this film. Her performance is spot on. Entirely unrelatedly, one can see how real-life NY Vogue fashion supremo, Anna Wintour, operates in the all-access 2009 documentary, The September Issue.
Emily Blunt, in an early role, is Andie's senior colleague when she starts. Blunt is rude and snooty (and, like Wintour, English), but also a vulnerable fashion victim, whose efforts to lose weight make her ill. She tells Andie to her face that she is too fat and ill-dressed, and makes jokes about her when other colleagues come to their office.
Stanley Tucci, as an in-house set designer, is the slightly camp, sane voice at Runway, who acts as Andie's advisor when she starts. In many ways, because of his sanity, the messages his character sends are the most disturbing. He tells Andie she must lose weight, and he makes over her wardrobe from the magazine's free samples. At the time we meet Andie, she is a naturally beautiful, size 10 (US size 6) young woman of considerable intellect: she is already the near-perfect 22-year-old. However, the film embraces the idea that thinner is better, that everyone thinks that designer clothes make you look better, and that powder make-up is an improvement on a naturally lovely young complexion.
Even more clearly than in Miranda's character, the film takes much of its inspiration from Funny Face, where Audrey Hepburn went from an intellectual NY bookworm to a Paris couture sensation. (Here, though, Andie does not converse with leading philosophers in French.) A number of Andie's looks resemble Hepburn's style, and this becomes increasingly obvious as the climax arrives in Paris.
Overall, very good light entertainment, with a memorable performance by Streep, but with some mixed messages about the fashion industry. 7/10
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Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
