La Fée (2011) - film review

Dom is a night watchman at a small hotel in Le Havre.  One evening, a strange woman appears in reception, without any luggage and with no shoes on her feet.  Introducing herself as Fiona, the woman says she is a fairy and promptly offers Dom three wishes.  The next day, two of the wishes have come true but Fiona has disappeared.  By now Dom realises that he has fallen in love with Fiona and all he wants is to be reunited with her...

The spirit of Jacques Tati and Charlie Chaplin lives on in this deliriously madcap romp, the latest foray into absurdist fantasy from Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy.   With a head-spinning marriage of panache and bravado, this incomparable trio repeat the winning formula of their previous two films - L’Iceberg (2005) and Rumba (2008) - and help us to rediscover the joys of the old-fashioned sight gag, whilst making some subtly scathing comments on present day society.  La Fée is the team’s slickest and most entertaining film to date, so totally off the wall and unlike anything else in today’s cinema that you could almost swear it was organically grown on another planet.  So idiosyncratic is Abel, Gordon and Romy’s brand of cinema that the French press have struggled to find the words to describe it - the best they have come up with so far is ’burlesque poétique’ (poetic farce).  The phrase ’mad as a crate of frogs’ is just as fitting...

The curious thing is that whilst the film looks like nothing on Earth, it has its basis in a style of comedy that is as old as cinema itself (if not older) - the vaudevillian slapstick pioneered by Max Linder and Charlie Chaplin, and later refined by Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy.   The genius of Abel, Gordon and Romy lies in the way in which they resurrect the old gags, polish them up a bit, and slot them effortlessly into a modern context.  In doing so, they not only make us laugh but also prompt us to look at familiar situations from a radically new perspective, something that many of today’s filmmakers seem reluctant or unable to do.   Hard-edged social realism of the Ken Loach variety is one way to draw our attention to the ills and injustices that afflict contemporary society.  Abel, Gordon and Romy adopt a completely different approach but achieve a similar result through the art of silent comedy, luring us in with an easy laugh, then suddenly opening our eyes to the nastiness that surrounds us and in which we are partly complicit.

Set in the gloomy sea port of Le Havre (the location of many a doom-laden French melodrama, notably Marcel Carné’s 1938 masterpiece Le Quai des brumes), La Fée has a somewhat more sombre feel to it than Abel, Gordon and Romy’s previous films, and it is not too hard to glimpse the sharp shards of social realism amidst the comedy confetti.   An old-fashioned love story (involving a solitary night watchman and a homeless fairy with a bad taste in footwear) is the starting point for a surreal odyssey in which our lovelorn heroes Dom and Fiona (cinema’s latest reincarnation of Tristan and Isolde) are kept apart, not by fate but by the festering wounds in present day society, a society in which the new bogeymen are the homeless, illegal immigrants and the mentally ill - ironically just as it was in Chaplin’s day (plus ça change...).

Although the film does have a political subtext, it is not an overtly political film.  Rather, what it is really about is exposing our own prejudices and reminding us how little tolerance and generosity we have for others less fortunate than ourselves.  It achieves this by some outrageous excursions into black comedy - these don’t so much throw political correctness out of the window as hurl it into the food blender, crush it to atoms (more effectively than any Large Hadron Collider), flush it down the lavatory and spray the malodorous residue into the faces of the wilfully indignant.  It is not the deformed, the disabled and the mentally ill that the film is mocking, but rather our chauvenistic attitudes to those who fall short of our narrow idea of perfection.  La Fée is not only a funny and original piece of cinema, a bonanza of comic book humour that can hardly fail to delight.  It is also a film with a conscience, one that compels us to reflect on our own failings and on the ills that blight society today.  The real function of comedy is not to make us laugh, but to make us think, and this inspired film certainly achieves this, in spades.

© James Travers 2011

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