Photographing Fairies

Rating

Director

Nick Willing

Screenplay

Chris Harrald, Steve Szilagyi, Nick Willing

Length

1h 46m

Starring

Toby Stephens, Emily Wolf, Ben Kingsley, Frances Barber, Phil Davis, Hannah Bould, Miriam Grant, Rachel Shelley, Edward Hardwicke, Clive Merrison

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
Is it better to have loved and lost or never to have loved at all? Photographing Fairies takes that question and poses it with a mythical flavour.

Charles Castle (Toby Stephens) is a famous photographer whose newlywed wife Anne-Marie (Rachel Shelley) met her fate in an icy crevice high in the mountains while the two were honeymooning. Charles has little time to mourn, as he’s soon thrust into the First World War as a war photographer.

After the war, Charles returns to his photography practice where he often fakes photographs of parents and their children who were lost in the war. One afternoon, while attending a centre for psychic and paranormal phenomena, Charles enters a dialogue disputing the existence of fairies in a photograph purported to show them. Upon revealing the inaccuracies, he is congratulated by novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Edward Hardwicke) and later approached by a woman in attendance of the event who wants to prove the existence of fairies within a photograph of her daughter.

Beatrice Templeton (Frances Barber) explains how she never believed in them until her children swore they were real, and the photograph seems to prove it. Charles initially dismisses Beatrice, but after she leaves, discovers something in the photograph that proves her ideas. From there he takes a greater interest, meeting Beatrice’s children and her husband, an arrogant reverend (Ben Kingsley) who believes that she and Charles are having an affair.

The performances in Photographing Fairies won’t win any awards, but these actors are capable of conveying their characters’ emotions. Having played just about every role conceivable, Kingsley can’t help but be modestly flat here. He’s appeared as a quietly rebellious leader in Gandhi, a ghetto Jew during the Holocaust in Schindler’s List and a foul-mouthed thief in Sexy Beast. Here he’s a jealous priest with limited moral fibre, a character he plays too far over the top. Assisting him are the often wooden, but complex Stephens, the sweet and simple Emily Woof as the Templetons’ nanny Linda, and the quiet and unselfish Barber. Hannah Bould and Miriam Grant as the Templetons’ daughters Clara and Ana match their adult counterparts and act well for their age.

Director Nick Willing presents a world of mysticism and unparalleled joy in which the lives of disparate individuals can be bonded through a simple act of faith. His use of the reverend as a counterpoint to the argument of faith versus fantasy is the film’s most powerful symbolic statement. Credit for this smart approach goes to Willing who, along with Chris Harrald, adapted the screenplay from Steve Szilagyi’s novel, creating an intense examination of how our lives could be different if we believed in our fantasies and put truth into the background.

The film comes across as an attack on organized religion. It implies that religious zealots take the fantasies of an enlightened age and consider them incontrovertible truths, despite the absence of empirical evidence to back them up. These zealots force the subjugation of our imagination, demanding that we believe one set of mythical perspectives without accepting others.

Anyone who wishes to believe in something more than the physical reality we perceive will find Photographing Fairies provocative and interesting. It is an emotional film that claims there is more out there than we perceive, telling us that it takes faith and persistence to recognize it.

Review Written

May 9, 2002