"The Fairy" tells the story a man (Dom, played by Dominique Abel) who works the night shift in a small hotel near the industrial seaport of Le Havre.One night, a woman named Fiona (Fiona Gordon) arrives, with no luggage and no shoes - and she tells Dom that she is a fairy. After granting him two wishes (i.e. a scooter and unlimited gas), Fiona mysteriously disappears, leaving the shy and soft-spoken Dom with a broken heart.In love, and determined to find Fiona, Dom goes on a quest to find his fairy and ends up in a series of slapstick misadventures that defy the laws of physics - and the very conventions of slapstick cinema.
Dom works the night shift in a small hotel near the industrial seaport of Le Havre. One night, a woman named Fiona arrives, with no luggage and no shoes. She tells Dom that she is a fairy, and grants him three wishes. However, before she is able to grant the third wish, she mysteriously disappears. By this point, Dom has fallen in love with Fiona, and sets out on a quest to find her, leading the two on a series of comic misadventures. (Kino Lorber).It appeared six times per year and nine volumes were published, from 1930 to 1958. Watch The Fairy Movie Online
Derek Thompson (Dwayne Johnson) is a minor league hockey player nicknamed "The Tooth Fairy", for hitting opposing players so hard that he knocks out their teeth. One night, Derek steals a dollar from his girlfriend Carly's (Ashley Judd) six-year-old daughter Tess (Destiny Whitlock) that had been left for her lost tooth. Later that night, he receives a summons under his pillow. He magically grows wings and is transported to the realm of tooth fairies. There, he meets his case worker, Tracy (Stephen Merchant), and the head fairy, Lily (Julie Andrews). Lily tells Derek that he is a "dream crusher", due to his unsympathetic dealings with children, and Tess in particular. He is then sentenced to serve two weeks as a tooth fairy. He returns to his bed and wakes up, believing that it was a dream.
In their third feature, gifted physical comedians Abel, Gordon and Romy gracefully build on their distinctive brand of burlesque humour. They have also been building an audience base, and The Fairy (La Fee) - which opened Director’s Fortnight - is unlikely to buckle that trend with its Chaplain-esque interludes set in an off-kilter, colour-drenched Le Havre.A particularly memorable moment comes when one of the Les Dieselles rugby players (Lemarchand) performs a knockout version of the Kurt Weil song Youkali.Theirs is an old-fashioned, almost silent, routine (their first feature L’Iceberg was virtually wordless) blended beautifully with an arresting dance element. With their angular, exaggerated features, Brussels-based Gordon, Abel and Romy are akin to a circus clown troupe, vaudevillians who sprinkle the big screen with their art and unique aesthetic. The Fairy is not for everyone, but most people who try it should like it.
As with 2008’s Rumba, Gordon and Abel play Fiona and Dom. This time, they haven’t met yet. He’s a night porter at a run-down hotel; she’s a self-proclaimed fairy in a dirty tracksuit who rescues him from choking on a ketchup top in some particularly broad comic scenes. An Englishman (Martz) also checks into the same hotel with a dog hidden in his bag.The Fairy soon ups the ante, with Fiona stealing some clothes and shoes from local shops for her date with Dom; the first of the film’s many amusing fixed-camera chases with the police ensues. Eventually they meet at the Love Is Blurred bar (L’Amour Flou), where they encounter its almost-blind manager (Romy). They fall in love, of course, in a dance sequence set underwater; the effects are worthy of a bathtub, but the performance itself is mesmerising.By this time, the audience is completely on-side, and when Fiona becomes pregnant their antics scale up a notch further, culminating in a sequence worthy of the best of Tati or Keaton with a bar full of female rugby players and a mad dash after a baby stuck on the bonnet of a car which is being driven by a blind man with three illegal aliens in the boot. Only in Le Havre.
Rumba, which played out in the Quinzaine, notched over 100,000 admissions in France and sold to the US (Koch-Lorber). Now opening Director’s Fortnight, Gordon, Abel and Remy have slightly widened their scope but retained the unique elements which make them so special. While Dinah Washington’s What A Difference A Day Makes studs the piece, a particularly memorable moment comes when one of the Les Dieselles rugby players (Lemarchand) performs a knockout version of the Kurt Weil song Youkali.
The Fairy (La Fee). Firmly grounded in the work of Chaplin, Keaton and especially Jacques Tati, to which they add a few welcome socio-political twists, these talented writers-directors-actors should have their wish granted with further arthouse exposure following an opening bow in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
Related Topics.As they already revealed in their previous features, Iceberg and Rumba (which played the 2008 Critics’ Week), the team applies an old school approach to their light-hearted comic scenarios, lining up a series of slapstick episodes that hark back to the silent film era, and could justifiably work without any sound at all. While dialogue is sparingly and often cleverly used, music however plays an important role by allowing these acrobatic performers to engage in a handful of graceful dance sequences that serve as brief intermissions to the action.Set in the gloomy port city of Le Havre, the film kicks off with its most successfully extended number when we’re introduced to a hotel night clerk, Dom (Abel), who’s pleasant soiree in front of the TV is interrupted with the arrival of an English tourist (Philippe Martz), and then of a svelte, shoeless woman (Gordon), who claims she’s a fairy and grants Dom three wishes. Like any self-respecting Frenchman living outside of Paris, Dom asks for a scooter and
