Photographing Fairies (1997)

Director:

Nick Willing

Writers:

Chris Harrald (written by)
Steve Szilagyi (book)

Release Date:

19 September 1997 (UK)

Genre:

Drama | Fantasy | Mystery

Plot:

Photographer Charles Castle is numbed with grief following the death of his beautiful bride. He goes off to war...

Plot Keywords:

Death | Fairy | Capital Punishment | Surrealism | 1910s

Awards:

5 wins & 3 nominations

Cast

Toby Stephens	...	Charles Castle
Emily Woof	...	Linda
Ben Kingsley	...	Reverend Templeton
Frances Barber	...	Beatrice Templeton
Philip Davis	...	Roy (as Phil Davis)
Hannah Bould	...	Clara Templeton
Miriam Grant	...	Ana Templeton
Rachel Shelley	...	Mrs. Anne-Marie Castle
Edward Hardwicke	...	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Clive Merrison	...	Gardner
Stephen Churchett	...	Mr. Dawson
Mary Healey-Pisano	...	Mrs. Dawson
Maggie Wells	...	Mrs. Hoopdriver
Richenda Carey	...	Fierce Woman
Jeremy Young	...	Des

Also Known As:

Apparition (Australia) (video box title)

MPAA:

Rated R for some sexuality.

Runtime:

106 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Netherlands:12 | Iceland:12 | Australia:M (DVD rating) | Australia:MA | Portugal:M/12 | Singapore:R(A) | Spain:13 | UK:15 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Ealing Studios, Ealing, London, England, UK

Company:

Arts Council of England

Trivia:

Edward Hardwicke, who plays Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, has played Conan Doyle's Dr. Watson many times.

Movie Connections:

Version of "BBC2 Play of the Week: Fairies (#2.2)" (1978)

A superb British Fantasy

Along with other great English fantasy films like The Company of Wolves, Things to Come, The Devil Rides Out and Jonathan Millers's BBC-filmed production of Alice in Wonderland, this is an intelligent and complex production, miles away in mood and concern from the typical American product. In a film that reminds one of his father Robert's The Asphyx, (as it also involves the attempt to film the supernatural by nineteenth century photographers) Toby Stephens is ideal as the intense, mourning photographer Castle, haunted by the abrupt death of his wife.

The central concern of the film, that of seeing, or not seeing (or perhaps more perhaps *comprehending*, or not - is established in the opening shot of the film: the blurred face of Castle alone in the group photograph he takes of his wife and others. In an image which anticipates those of the fairies later on, he is the one blurred, here the 'ghost' on his film. Appropriately, in a film full of echoes and symbols, this long shot out from Castle's wife's iris recalls his later, obsessive, photographic enlargement of another eye: that of one of the girls photographed with fairies.

The death of his wife then reduces Castle further, through grief and shock, to a state almost like that of a somnambulist. He walks through life, hovering between the shades, oblivious to fear and the concerns of the real world - as evidenced by the unexploded bomb he encounters without any sense of danger, ticking like the time piece he keeps to remember his wife. Castle doesn't care. He wants to die - a sense of foreboding which stays with the viewer from the beginning to the end of the film. He even 'photographs the dead' in his studio, witnessed by his work for the soldier's parents. Even when a new sexual relationship becomes a possibility, later in the film, he cannot rejoin this aspect of life though spiritual malaise.

This thread is continued later in the scene later where Castle enters the church to hear a sermon by the bereaved Kingsley. Earlier that morning he has taken the flower-drug and has 'died' watching the fairies. Now he appears, bloodied like a victim in Macbeth, as the pale ghost at the ceremony..

Castle's attempt to photograph fairies, spirits who hover between life and death, is obviously an attempt to capture something back from the spirit world that has captured his wife. Such is the delicacy and subtlety of the films structure and symbolism, however, that at the end one could feasibly argue that Castle actually died with his wife on the mountain and - rather like in The Occurrence At Owl Bridge Creek - what has happened since the opening scenes has just been the dream of a dying man!

Performances are generally excellent (although Ben Kingsley's wig and stare are slightly disconcerting). Those who found the actual fairies disappointing in effect were perhaps expecting something grander. Some of Castle's hallucinations reminded me of Jacob's Ladder and Kingsley's demise of the killer's suicide in Peeping Tom.

As a last instance of the film's care with presentation and sophistication, one may take the music. The chief elements that reoccur are a sombre dirge like bass-motif and a light waltz. Only at the end of the film does recognise that the bass-motif is an altered element of the famous Beethoven slow movement which plays throughout the last few scenes. Like Castle himself, it is transfigured - or 'completed' by events.