35mm and DCP List Autumn 2012 - Access Cinema

of finer consideration of morality being bulldozed out of the way to make sure Costa
makes it to redemption on time. - Amber Wilkenson, Eye for Film
Winner - Audience Award, Berlin Film Festival 2011
Fairy, The La Fee
Dir: Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel France/Belgium 2011 94 mins Cert: TBC
Starring: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Philippe Martz
Language: French
Available: From September
Formats: 35mm + D-Cinema
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNK6GFoSB4s
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 - 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.
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