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