Review: Photographing Fairies
Spoiler alert: If you have not yet seen Photographing Fairies,
then be advised that this review reveals details of what for the sake of
argument I shall call the plot.
We all remember the two little girls who claimed to have taken photographs
of fairies. They stuck to the story throughout their lives, fooling a lot of
grown-ups including Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. They finally came clean, as very
old ladies, on an edition of Nationwide in the 1970s. The 'fairies' had been
cut-out drawings, attached to the tree with long hat pins. Experts had not been
able to work out how the pictures were done because they were looking for
photographic, rather than mechanical, trickery. By any standard, the pictures
are good special-effects.
Now, there are two perfectly good movies to be made about this hoax. One
would be about how two little girls fooled a lot of grown ups. It would play
with the idea of childhood innocence, of adults being reluctant to leave a
private play-world which linked them, with gossip and hoax and how a lie can
get out of hand and become self-perpetuating. The other would deal with the
myth: it would use artistic licence, assume that the photos were genuine, and
ask the question 'What would it mean if photos of supernatural entities could
be taken?'
Photographing Fairies is the second film. Although there are several months
still to run, it is almost certain to be awarded the 'Unmitigated Pile of Tosh'
award for 1997.
To its credit, it starts off by debunking the Cottinley pictures and locates
its supernatural occurrence at a different and presumably fictitious location.
The debunker is Charles Castle, a photographer played by Toby Stevens, trying
so hard to be Hugh Grant that it hurts to watch. He doesn't have to take more
than two glances at the pictures before he is rattling off James Randi's list
of flaws.
He is immediately congratulated for this piece of deduction ('worthy of
Sherlock Holmes') by an Edwardian gentleman claiming to be Conan-Doyle. The
audience know better: if it's Edward Hardwick, it must be Doctor Watson. Quite
how this fits in with Doyle's recorded gullibility about the photos is not
explained.
Five minutes later, a country vicars wife turns up at Castle's consulting
room, sorry, studio, to tell him that her daughters have also been taking fey
snapshots and that hers are perfectly genuine. Unlike the hoax pictures, these
fairy images are very blurred: implying that they move too quickly to be seen,
but can be captured on long-exposure Victorian plates. To the consternation of
his chirpy cockney assistant, he spends the night experimenting on the
pictures, and then catches the first stream train to Heritage England to
investigate. He steps in some horseshit to remind us how realistic everything
his.
Castle is, you see, a fully rounded character. He lost his newly wed wife in
a melodramatic hiking accident in the Swedish Alps. Unlike Doyle (whose
bereavement made him a believer in the afterlife) this has turned Castle into a
sceptic and a cynic. However, if fairies are real, and if they are the
messengers between this world and the next (as they aren't in traditional fairy
mythology) then maybe they somehow represent a link with his dead wife. In the
way of these things, he becomes obsessed with proving the little girls' story.
The fairy manifestations centre around an Old Oak Tree in a wood near their
house. (This being the Olden Days, it is all right for girls to play in the
woods by themselves.) They call up the fairies by performing a cute black mass
involving a puppet theatre and magical flowers, implying that the fairies are
either a drug hallucination, or they aren't. Their mother has also been
munching the magic flower. She tells Castle that she has seen the fairies, and
subsequently, while under the influence, climbs the fairy tree and falls out,
breaking her neck. Mr Castle prizes one of the flowers out of her cold dead
hand. In some way, time seems to speed up around him, enabling him to see the
fairies. They are computer generated, naked, and drag him into a dream sequence
involving a very unVictorian woman-on-top sex scene with his dead wife.
Understandably, at this point, he also falls out of the tree.
Now, at this stage in the film, we are already in a steaming great mess.
What is interesting about the Cottinley fairies is that they represent a
classic Victorian category mistake—the idea that something presumably
supernatural (fairies, the soul, moral goodness) could be analysed by
scientific means (photography, spiritualism, measuring criminals skulls.) The
photos are interesting because they appear to show that fairies are in fact
material, rational, relatively prosaic creatures. Fairies that you can only see
by magic, or a drug, or a quasi-religious ceremony would not be nearly as
interesting. The point of the Cottinley fairies is that they are part of the
rational, scientific world: the point of the fairies in the film is that they
aren't.
The little girls father is a vicar, hammed up by Ben Kinglsey. He is a
sinister figure, who talks about faith. Castle suggest that faith is a way of
blinding yourself to the truth. The conflict here appears to be between Bad Old
Time Religion (accept everything on faith) and Good Victorian Science (demand
ocular proof). Or maybe between the sensual, emotional, bonking after life that
Castle appears to have proof of, and the cold one that the Vicar talks about.
When we actually see the Vicar conducting his wife's funeral (a strange
service, with neither prayer book nor coffin, but the congregation don't seem
to mind) what he actually preaches is pure Victorian spiritualism, or maybe
Hinduism —his wife has left her shell behind, but her soul has evolved into
something better; she has awoken from a dream, and we are the dream she has
awoken from. This seems to be exactly what Castle thinks the fairies prove. So
maybe the difference is that the bad Vicar believes without proof, but the good
scientist believes with proof. I give up.
When Castle has taken his own fairy pictures, he goes back to show them to
Conan-Doyle. Doyle examines the pictures with a big magnifying glass, in case
we'd forgotten. Doyle can't discredit the pictures, but he doubts the
after-life which Castle thinks they prove. Doyle thinks heaven is only 'a state
of mind which we aspire to'; Castle thinks it is 'as real as Clacton on Sea.'
In real life, the point of Doyle was that he was gullible; in the film, the
point of him is that he is sceptical. I suppose if the vicar is a Hindu, its
only fair that the spiritualist should be a liberal Anglican. The conflict now
is between triflers like Doyle whose interest in the afterlife is purely
academic (all he will do is offer to stage a debate with Castle) and good
people for whom it is a living issue.
All is not well at the vicarage. Castle persuades the little girls to tell
him where the magic flowers grow. But they have been off munching again, and,
sure enough, one of them falls out of the tree. Ben Kingsley spots that this is
a recurrent motif, and goes completely over the top. He destroys Castles
camera, and chops down the tree (no mean feat, given its size and his age.) As
he burns the tree, he burns the fairies as well. This upsets Castle. They have
a fight. Castle accidentally impales him on a photographic tripod. He gives
himself up to the police, and despite the fact that it was quite obviously
accidental and he is quite obviously barking, he is hanged.
The hanging scene is a masterpiece of unintentional comedy. Castle has been
provided with (iced) champagne for his last breakfast. The warden knocks on his
cell door and says 'It's time', to which Castle replies 'So soon?' They have
both clearly been watching too many gangster movies. The gallows appear to have
been set up in some sort of cathedral cloister.
Castle is perfectly calm. You see he wants to die. He believes in the
fairies so strongly that he doesn't think that death matters. Which makes it
all right that we see the hanging from his point of view (evidently, the idea
of hoods and blindfolds had not yet been thought of). No sooner has he dropped
through the trapdoor than we are whizzing off down one of those
near-death-experience tunnels of light, at the end of which is a fairy. The
fairy takes him back to the original Swiss walking holiday where his love so
melodramatically snuffed it. Only this time he rescues her. Freeze frame on
kiss. Role credits. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
To summarise the films main sins:
1: Disneyland England.
Not since Shadowlands have I seen a film so lovingly set
in the Olden Days but so replete with modern attitudes. I do not believe that
Edwardian village clergymen went jogging. I certainly do not believe that the
paparazzi were a great problem in 1919. ('Are you going to take a picture and
sell it to a London newspaper', asks Linda the children's nanny? She even
suggests the headline 'Mother of two in tragic accident.')
2:Clichés
Castle teeters on the brink of saying the brink of saying 'the truth is out
there'. His lady love falls into a ravine, hangs on to his hand, but gradually
slips away. The musical watch that was her only present to him is pulled out
and opened at strategic moments. Every time anyone falls out of a tree, we slip
into slow motion. The walk to the gallows is filmed at foot level. Every scene,
practically every line, is an appallingly hoary cliché. I don't know whether
Victorian cameras would have been capable of doing multiple-enlargements so
that we could see fairies reflected in little girls retinas. I do know that its
a recurrent X-Files plot device.
4: Monumental Lack of Subtlety
Castle makes his living doing trick photos, adding the faces of soldiers killed
in the war to family groups. As he pastes a picture together, he murmurs 'I am
the resurrection and the life.' Sure enough, the clergyman at the gallows
repeats the same verse. When Linda is moving the children to a new house after
the tragedy we see her packing away the children's books—all of which have the
word 'fairy' prominently in the titles. The first thing we see in the trial
seen is lots of cameras going off. Ham-fisted film-school symbolism, pointing
nowhere, so irritatig and obvious that the audience cringe.
3: Incoherent cosmology
Take your pick, chaps. Are fairies:
a: The reincarnations of dead lovers, intermediaries between this world and the
next.
b: Material organisms that move so fast we can't see them
c: Dreams that one has under the influence of some sort of drug
d: Magic creatures summonsed up by rituals.
4: Incoherent symbolism
Is the message that the beloved dead remain present in some way (only a heart
beat away) if only we could learn to perceive them? Or is that the past should
stay in the past and that we should learn to let go? Is Castle enlightened
because he lets himself die to go back to his former love, or is the message
that in Linda he had potentially a new love in the here and now? Are the
conventional clergy to be condemned for believing too strongly in the next
world rather or for not believing strongly enough? Is seeking after you dead
love in the next world recommended, or deplored? In what sense are Castles
beliefs, the vicars and Conan-Doyle's different?
5: Laughably stupid plotting
Would even someone playing the Repressed Englishman template chase two little
girls into the woods the first time he sees them rather than go and visit their
parents? Would an English judge in 1920 have allowed a man who has just pled
guilty to a capital crime to make a speech in open court explaining his
theories of the afterlife? (Was there a 'right to council' in 1920?) Would a
middle aged clergymen, even a mad one, really have managed to cut down that big
a tree in an afternoon? And aren't there better ways with dealing with
impostors at the vicarage than to ask them to go jogging with you, suggesting
that they walk across a log over a chasm, and then tripping them up and
interrogating them while they dangle over the abyss?
There is a type of American film—call it a 'feelgood movie' or a 'therapy
movie' or just 'a load of crap'—which tries so hard to appeal to everybody that
it ends up saying nothing. Shine! can't be about Jewish families and the pressures
of talent, it has to be about staying true to yourself. Michael Collins can't
be about a particular moment in Irish history, it has to be about staying true
to yourself. Shadowlands (I spit on its grave) can't be about a particular type
of religious faith facing a particular type of crisis—it has to be about the
need to believe in Something, in Yourself, that is to say, about staying true
to yourself. Sleepers can't be about child abuse in American children's
homes—it has to turn into a buddy-buddy redeeming power of close male
friendship movie. This is usually blamed on the very high budgets of American
movies, the process of script-writing by committee, and the tendency to
re-write films on the basis of the reactions of preview audiences.
It is nice to know that the English can achieve the same results with
nothing more than an Arts Council grant.
Tosh, tosh, tosh, tosh, tosh.