Directed by: David Frankel Starring: Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep, Adrian Grenier, Tracie Thoms
If the devil’s designer of choice for 2006 is Prada, then Hollywood does a pretty good job of convincing us it is. It certainly makes all the right moves: the unread by me chick-lit bestseller by Lauren Weisberger plugging a modern Cinderella into the cutthroat world of high fashion is an odds-on bet for a hit; Anne Hathaway, the one of the huggable good looks and wide-eyed innocence, is the premium Hollywood ugly-duckling-come-beautiful-swan of today; Meryl Streep is the one actress who can go wildly over the top and still be the better for it; director David Frankel’s experience with Sex and the City allows him to treat the material with the right combination of loving insight and satire. Yes, this film never goes more than ankle deep about its subject matter and is specialised calculated entertainment, but The Devil Wears Prada is very well calculated and you will not hear me complaining.
Hathaway is Andy Sachs, a girl fresh out of university whose stint as an editor of the school newspaper made her want to be a serious writer. Her chance at the big times comes in the form of a job interview with a proverbial monster of an employer, whose relative approval may open the door for any career you might wish for.
The said employer is Miranda Priestly (Streep), the omni-powerful editor of the thick fashion bible Runway. The fear she strikes in the hearts of her employees, as seen in the film, is only comparable to the one generated by Stalin, but it transpires that “a million girls would kill for the job” of being her assistant and test their tolerance for stress and humiliation.
Because she is oblivious to Miranda’s reputation and is thus not paralysed by terror, young Andy gets the job as a second assistant, and gets a crash course at dressing properly and dealing with a swarm of absurd tasks: find “the new Harry Potter” in three hours, the manuscript of the unpublished one, that is. Andy, however, hits the right notes and blossoms into a beauty under the guidance of Nigel (Stanley Tucci), the magazine’s fashion director. Naturally, she is almost, but not quite, seduced by Miranda’s world of cynicism and glamour, yet enough to alarm the artificially grungy boyfriend (Adrian Grenier) and make him pine for “the old Andy I used to know”. It goes without saying that Andy negotiates all the obstacles with the charm and luck of the proverbial good heart, and ultimately breezes through this rite of passage with flying colors.
Miss Hathaway does her modern-day Cinderella transformation in fine style, but expectedly Streep hijacks the show in the same gracefully unceremonious fashion in which her character deals with her underlings. Streep’s Miranda is as brilliant and funny a film villainesse as one could care to remember. The one minor grievance with this rendition of the Cinderella set up is the ostensible lack of a prince who is on a par with the pleasing female tandem. Neither the deliberately scruffy boyfriend nor the serious writer Christian (Simon Baker), in whom Andy might be interested, does enough to inject a healthy doze of romance into the proceedings. But then again, this breed of glamorous women with power might just as well adopt their male counterparts’ stance on romance – that of an irritating digression.
