Flatpack

Dir: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon & Bruno Romy

(Belgium/France 2011, 93 mins)

Cert: PG

 

A night porter has his life turned upside down when a woman walks into his hotel and offers him three wishes. He makes two, both granted immediately, but their budding romance stalls when she is readmitted into a mental hospital. The dialogue in The Fairy probably fits onto one page. The whole movie is built around Abel and Gordon’s glorious physical routines, from an undersea dance with plastic-bag jellyfish to a back-projected car chase with cliffhanger climax, and though the setting may be nondescript (Le Havre – see also Kaurismaki’s new one) this is the kind of sublime childsplay that Stan and Ollie would have loved.