What does the devil wear?

I've read such remarkably mixed reviews about this movie, I don't know whether to look forward to it or completely ignore its showing in Manila theaters while putting up with the expected "toast of the town" status that fashionistas, fashion victims and fashion designers will most likely stamp it with.

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Although I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this film, I would be a hypocrite if I did not admit to enjoying it. Unlike the computer-generated, special effects nonsense that reigns at the box office today, this is a real movie. It has characters, superb acting, a plot with a beginning, middle, and end, and from start to finish it looks good. It is the first feature film from David Frankel, who previously worked in television.

It tells the story of a young girl from the provinces (a recent journalism grad from Northwestern University) who attempts to make her way in the great city, New York. Its heroine, Anne Hathaway, the heroine, enters a sea of sharks, barely knowing how to swim, but she’s smart and resourceful, as well as talented, and soon begins to make headway. Or to switch the metaphor, she’s an innocent who must become as wise as a serpent. Structurally, this is the basic comic plot in which a protagonist starts out in a “mad” world dominated by an oppressive, life-denying blocking figure only to escape to a “green” world of a more fulfilling life. Generically, it belongs to the working girl category and to those films featuring fashion shows such as Roberta (1935) and Vogues of 1938 (1937).

But my reservations about the film arise not from its approving satire of the “world,” an accepting mockery whose lineage goes back to the Roman poet Horace, as opposed to the savage indignation of a Juvenal or a Swift. It results from the film’s sexual morality. Hathaway has a boyfriend. Though he appears to be more authentic, that is, more run down and beat looking than she, and less corrupted by the world, he too wants to advance his career as a chef. The trouble is that they live together. If the film depicted them as having a chaste courtship, it would appear unreal to the majority of audiences. Such is the nature of romantic love according to the conventions of our time. A 20s-something virginal woman, as in one of the Seinfeld episodes, can only elicit curiosity and ridicule.

Dr. Johnson criticised the novel Tom Jones because its hero, before he reformed, engaged in illicit amours. But such sin followed by repentance was the time-honoured way of showing the world “as it is” and the world “as it ought to be.” The Devil Wears Prada makes no such distinction. Its ambivalence about the way of the world leaves me with a mixed response. Much of what I saw I liked, but in the end I wanted to see art wed to morality, not just engaged in a flirtation.

Full review at MercatorNet