"Flattire" is a newish word which describes an ersatz satire which actually celebrates and defers to that which it is supposed to be sending up. Watching this moderately entertaining film about fashion, I wondered what further word you'd need for flattire with the satire removed. Perhaps "flattery" covers it.
Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, the super-scary New York fashion editor with the appropriately adverbial surname. She is of course similar to American Vogue's legendary Anna Wintour, although Priestly wears her dark glasses outdoors only. On the principle that servants are like lovers - if you want to keep them, you must treat them badly - Miranda has an emotional S&M relationship with the staff and the S is her prerogative; she bullies and humiliates them and they worship her in return.
Enter Andy (Anne Hathaway) a goofy young provincial woman with good grades and bad clothes, hailing from Ohio, one of what the fashion world calls the "flyover states"; she's applying for a job as a stopgap before she becomes a real writer. From some unfathomably cruel caprice, Miranda decides to hire the terrified Andy as her assistant, who feels she must get the hang of fashion or die of shame. Gradually, Andy becomes more stylish, more beautiful, more hooked on the drug of high fashion, more slavishly adoring of Miranda. Is she (gulp!) turning into Miranda?
Inevitably, like so many other books and movies about the seductions of the big city, The Devil Wears Prada wants to have its non-fat, vegan cake and eat it. It wants to hitch a free ride on all the high-speed excitement of the wicked fashion biz - before finally growing up and deciding it's way too superficial. Andy winds up being scared by how badly she's behaving, though of course she never does anything really bad.
Streep is undoubtedly a good turn in the dragon lady role, especially at the very beginning, interrogating Andy in a chillingly light voice with a misleadingly upward inflection. "And you want a job here, despite having no personal sense of fashion or style ...?" "Well, I think that's a matter of -" "It is not a question."
When Streep is absent from the screen, however, the interest factor plummets. Stanley Tucci plays the obligatory Bald Gay Male Confidant figure (Willie Garson did it in Sex and the City). He does his best. The real disappointment is Emily Blunt as the Brit bitch who works opposite Andy: the one actor here who really does look as if she could work in fashion. But she is strained and awkward and has none of the drop-dead-sexy hauteur she showed us in My Summer of Love. Embarrassingly, she is made to say "loo" to show off some real limeyspeak. Perhaps she can be grateful she wasn't given bad teeth.
Then of course there are cameos for real-life fashion stars coming on woodenly as Themselves, and that is always, always the kiss of death. Real fashionistas, however stylish, are a boulder-sized lump of Kryptonite for comedy - here, as in Altman's 1994 fashion film Prêt-à-Porter. In fact the film has a couple of all-too-serious speeches about how important fashion actually is, thank you so much. Now, I'll be the first to admit I don't "get" fashion, but to intimate its ephemeral pleasures to the non-believer and non-understander, I think you'd need a more astringent and detached - and a funnier - movie than this.
This text is taken from the guardian and shows the film review for the film The devil wears Prada. Like 27 Dresses the guardian has only given this film 2 out of five stars; and a fairly negative review.
Reviewer's Rating  User Rating  |
| The Devil Wears Prada (2006) |
| Reviewed by Stella Papamichael Updated 05 October 2006 |  Contains mild language |
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The humour is as spiky as a pair of Manolo Blahniks yet The Devil Wears Prada isn't just a satire on the fashion industry. Anne Hathaway provides a soft centre as wannabe journalist Andy struggling to reconcile her ambition with a deeper core of human decency. Except for a dull romance plot, helmer David Frankel brings believable warmth to Lauren Weisberger's scathing book. Still, the real joy is in a smoulderingly sinister turn by Meryl Streep as Andy's egomaniacal boss.
Magazine editor Miranda Priestly is so imposing, she doesn't need to shout. Her indictments of Andy's weight and dress sense are softly spoken, languid and bitterly funny. As one colleague points out to the new assistant, "pressed lips" denote "catastrophe". But Streep presents more than a simmering cauldron of evil. Besides the designer clobber, she wears a discreet veil of tragedy and draws sympathy even while turning her nose up at the less fabulous.
"HOLDS A MORBID FASCINATION"
Frankel wisely avoids any mushiness in portraying what is basically a sadomasochistic mentor-protégé relationship. Andy takes as much humiliation as Miranda can dish out, but within that perverse dynamic, mutual respect develops convincingly and quite movingly.
It's a shame that Frankel ties pretty bows around the story in the end and it could have had more bite. Still what he does reveal about the fashion biz holds a morbid fascination. Understated moments like the withering once-over Andy is subjected to during her interview with Miranda are classic. Hathaway is an endearing foil, but it's Streep strutting her best stuff that really ties it all together.
This is the review for the Devil wears Prada from the BBC. Unlike the Guardian the BBc has given this film a positive review and a rating of four out of five stars.
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