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‘Fairy Folk’ review: An ingenious marriage story
Karan Gour's ‘Fairy Folk’ is an inventive, surprising and deceptively thoughtful comic indie
Think back to that afternoon when, spurred by inspiration or boredom, you and a few friends decided to record a little sketch. Imagine you did it with planning and care. Imagine you kept adding to it. Imagine it started to resemble a film. Finally, imagine it was good. That's what Fairy Folk feels like.
Karan Gour's film looks—deceptively—like something thrown together by friends over a few weekends. It’s presented very simply, and seems in large part improvised. It’s like a skit to begin with, a perfect short film idea. But the film keeps expanding, piling surprise upon surprise. By the end, it's become something rich and strange.
It starts with a car breaking down in a forest, the fraying relationship of its two occupants crystallized as one tries to fix the source problem and the other reaches for an immediate solution. As Ritika (Rasika Dugal) and her husband, Mohit (Mukul Chadda, Dugal’s husband), argue over whether to call an Uber, a naked humanoid appears and watches them from a slight distance, silent and motionless. They panic and drive off. The next scene is in their Mumbai apartment, where the creature (Nikhil Desai) has followed them. It’s androgynous, hairless, and has no genitalia. At first, it doesn’t seem to understand them. But Mohit—who has more free time on his hands than his wife—figures out a way to communicate with it. They call friends over and show off their new ‘family member’ (now clothed), making it fetch everyone’s drinks.
This is where Fairy Folk, the whimsical short, might have ended. Instead, the film takes its first big leap. After the party, Mohit, Ritika and the creature are in bed. Just as he dozes off, Mohit tenderly puts his hand on its face and kisses it lightly. The next morning, there’s a stranger in their kitchen (Chandrachoor Rai)—this one more human, with hair, clothes and speech. "I don't understand why I don't look like myself, but I am Mohit," he insists.
It's only right that a film called Fairy Folk turns on old-fashioned magical conceits like an enchanted forest and a kiss that turns a frog into a (relative) prince. New Mohit (he's introduced to their friends as Kabir, a cousin of Ritika's) is free of Original Mohit's neuroses and obsessiveness. He gets along with Ritika, and things progress from there. It's a reasonable thought experiment: would you, given a choice, opt for a tweaked version of your partner, flaws magically ironed out?
From the first scene, as Mohit struggles with the car, it's underlined how different husband and wife are. Though Fairy Folk is consistently funny and light on its feet, I also found it a sweetly sad film about a disintegrating relationship. When Ritika tells Mohit, "You think everything through...", it has the vehemence of someone who's opted out; she doesn't even need to add "...till the joy of it is gone". It's ironic how Mohit, a professional poker player, worries perpetually about the cards he's dealt, while Ritika, an actor, takes every new hand as it comes.
The more Mohit loses, the sadder and funnier he gets. His speech becomes more manic and less coherent as the film progresses until he's using four or five sentences to express a single thought that he hasn't wrapped his head around ("I have no life. I have no life. I don't even know what life I have. I don't even know what I am...I don't know," he says at one point). It's a wonderful sad sack performance by Chadda that works only because it's pitched against Dugal's implacable matter-of-factness, and the supporting turns of Pathare, Rai and the delightful Asmit Pathare as yet another creature.
With its self-contained story and two basic settings, Fairy Folk could easily have existed as a piece of theatre. It reminded me of RK/RKay (2021), another gently surreal film about dissatisfied creators and unruly creations. But Rajat Kapoor's film has something that Fairy Folk lacks—an aesthetic to match its invention. The lighting in Gour's film is flat, the framing self-conscious, the design choices uninteresting. His first film, Kshay (2011), offered some startling images on a minimal budget, so Fairy Folk's drabness might be a deliberate choice.
This is a film that wears its thoughtfulness lightly. Gour finds witty, inventive ways to talk about gender fluidity and self-worth and identity. But what really endeared Fairy Folk to me is how, every time you think the film has settled into its final form, something comes along to transform it. It's like those old cartoons where an animator's hand appears and sketches something new in the scene. There's nothing more exciting than a film that's constantly redrawing its own boundaries.
Watch the film at fairyfolkthefilm.com.
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Business NewsLounge‘Fairy Folk’ review: An ingenious marriage story
First Published:15 Jul 2024, 08:22 PM IST
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