The Fairy (***)

This bit of magical realism takes place in a universe that’s just a little more whimsical than ours, in a real city (Le Havre, on the French side of the English Channel) that somehow looks like a small town. One of the two main characters, Dom (Dominique Abel), is the middle-aged night man at a hotel that appears to be called…Hotel. He rides a broken down bicycle. As the film begins, a customer comes in with a dog and a French phrase book. No dogs allowed, he’s told, in English. Dom returns to the video he’d started to watch, only to have another customer ring. It is the same man, without the dog but with suitcase that seems to be moving around by itself. Again Dom returns to his movie, but another customer arrives, this time announcing that she’s a fairy and will grant him three wishes. She’s a little odd looking and rather lanky, like him, but basically ordinary, and with the ordinary name Fiona, not like a fairy. So he gives her a room too, and goes back to his movie, but the phone rings. It’s the fairy…. And so on. Fiona (Fiona Gordon) may have magical powers, or she may be only a thief. She may be crazy, or only crazy about Dom, who eventually wishes…for a scooter.

This is the third collaboration between the two stars and Bruno Romy, who plays a very nearly blind tavern owner. (All three are credited as writers and directors.) As with the recent film called Le Havre, it seems to be set in the present time, but with very few visual cues or plot points to indicate that. It’s more like the films of the silent era (think Charlie Chaplin), or of the French auteur Jacques Tati, or a lighter version of the American Jim Jarmusch. It’s the kind of movie some will find instantly annoying or silly, and the humor is not going to make you laugh out loud, but I like this kind of film, with recursive plotting and recurring characters and locations that make the city of 200,000+ seem so small, and the film theatrical. Granting that the charm for me wore off by the end—it’s hard to sustain such seemingly artless airiness for a whole feature length—I enjoyed it.

IMDb link

viewed 6/5/12 7:10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 6/5/12

Le Havre (**3/4)

I’d guess half of the French movies I’ve seen take place in Paris, and none in the port city whose very name means port. Technically, it may not be French, as its producer, director, and writer is the Finnish Aki Kaurismäki (The Man Without a Past). The less-familiar setting would seem to suit Kaurismäki’s seemingly stylizing rendering of the place. Although the film provides just enough hints to give the setting away as present day, or close to it, everything about it seems designed to make the place seem frozen in some time where people still use rotary phones (or have none, in the case of the main character), smoke in hospital rooms, and have never heard of a chain restaurant, or any sort of chain. Here a man can still make a modest living shining shoes, then toddle off to the pub while his wife contentedly cooks dinner for him.

It’s all very quaint, and so it would be more accurate to call Kaurismäki’s style of storytelling simple rather than minimalist. Although the story has the aging shoe shiner (André Wilms) shelter a Gabonese boy trying to evade the authorities, this is no more a film about illegal immigration than, say, Taxi Driver, is about teen prostitution. It’s a decent story about decent people being decent. I would like it to have been a little more than that, but the film is never more, though never less, than pleasant. Perhaps the closest it comes is when the shoe shiner, short on cash to help the young man, enlists the aid of a local rocker called Little Bob, who plays himself. True to form, his music sounds up to the minute, if the minute is in 1977.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse 12/8/11 and reviewed 12/8/11