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Rating: 2006 Comedy: Smooth and Entertaining.
A very respectable young lady, Hathaway/Andy, in search of a journalism career, inadvertently finds herself in the presence of a legendary fashion guru director, Streep/Miranda, of an important high fashion magazine. Despite being unsuitable for the company standards, she is hired due to the intuition of this powerful woman. She finds herself projected into a hallucinatory and hallucinogenic world of collective hysteria and unbearable hours. She performs psychophysical acrobatics to manage the role and eventually adapts to the office's hyper-efficiency culture. Andy changes her social life without much remorse, prioritizing her career over her boyfriend, who, exasperated, withdraws from the now grotesque relationship. When the young woman fully has the situation under control and enjoys her boss's confidence, she decides she does not want to be part of this world without values and humanity and leaves everything behind. She returns to her initial steps and reconnects with her aesthetics and her tolerant boyfriend.
Essentially, we are faced with an ambitious girl struggling with her own limitations, in terms of weight, aesthetics, and work, but not ethics. She completely changes the framework that represents her, but after learning not to wallow in self-pity and fight for the max, she chooses to keep her moral substance intact.
The film is enjoyable and throws us into the fashion world with its increasingly thinner models, the hunt for ever more innovative ideas, and the appreciation in the unwary spectator's eyes of how much this million-dollar industry revolves around, with their image presented to the world, dictating what should become trendy. Pure faith shines through from the professionals involved, as if dressing in life were the only important thing, whether you wear a pair of plastic shoes or a horrid cerulean blue sweater. Highlighted is also the irreconcilability of success at work or career ambitions with social life. Hathaway/Andy loses her boyfriend and neglects her friends, not unlike Streep/Miranda who faces a new divorce, or the declaration from assistant Tucci/Nigel, "finally I can decide about my life." That in the workplace people undercut each other is as old as time, reminded by the immortal saying "Mors tua, vita mea." Andy will be shocked to see the long-awaited dreams and ambitions of colleagues and acquaintances progressively crumble. It will be the drop that makes her say enough. The devil offers you the world but drains your soul.
Meryl Streep is phenomenal. This woman is magnetic and effective, and in this role, she is almost exhilarating. Stanley Tucci is another chameleon with excellent abilities. Unfortunately, cinema has never allowed him to shine as he deserves. Annie Hathaway is pleasant, but at times predictable in her expressions. What I didn't like about David Frankel's film is that the rosy-romantic root from Lauren Weisberger's book (same title) is too noticeable, and there is a sort of feminism (in the courting, in Andy's Parisian sexual adventures, in the boyfriend’s non-reactions) that I find unrealistic, along with the recycling of overly seen themes.
If nothing else, the interpretation through high fashion (and bunches of beautiful girls) with its trends is not bad.
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