While every scene is art-directed with zest and innovatively staged, The Fairy rarely inspires outright laughter. At least it respects its influences more than does "The Artist."
The Fairy(La fée)
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Belgium · 2011
Rated PG · 1h 33m
Director Bruno Romy
Starring Dominique Abel, Bruno Romy, Philippe Martz, Fiona Gordon
Genre Comedy, Drama
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Each night passes uneventfully for Dom, a clerk who works night shifts at a small hotel near Le Havre — until one night, a fairy arrives with three wishes to grant. She disappears after making two of his wishes come true, leaving the lovestruck Dom to find her himself in this colorful and near-silent comedy.
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What are critics saying?
Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny.
Deadpan clownishness is The Fairy's raison d'être and its superior mode; when the lovey-doveyness turns cloying and the atrophied message-mongering creeps in, you wish the threesome knew when to keep their traps shut.
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
The persistent whimsy gets a bit wearisome, but it's hard to dismiss any film so determined to make us happy.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
An alternately effortless and forced French-language diversion.
Deeply silly in a classic mode, The Fairy continues the French new wave of near-silent cinema.
For the most part, it's too dry and quirky to connect. Still, those gags are something.
The Fairy may be as close as we'll ever get to a live-action cartoon.
This is the third feature by the three gifted stars, who deftly pull off hilarious, nearly wordless slapstick routines reminiscent of Jacques Tati, Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis.
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