Photographing Fairies (1997)

The 1910s. Charles Castle (Toby Stephens) loses his wife Anne-Marie (Rachel Shelley) on the day after their wedding in a traumatic accident in the Swiss Alps. This leaves him suffering from the kind of grief that looks pretty much the same as a case of PTSD. Consequently, he spends his time as a battle photographer in the Great War with what looks a lot like a death wish to anyone not him, not directly trying to commit suicide but taking needless risks that are bound to get him killed eventually.

Somehow, he does survive. When the main part of the film takes place, Charles has established himself as a photographer in London after the war, together with his war photographer’s assistant Roy (Phil Davis). Roy’s also the man he uses as a stand-in when he’s making family photos of the war dead and their living families, the faces to be retouched in later. He’s pretty abrasive in his manner, so I wouldn’t bet on too long a career. One day, Charles wanders into the Theosophical Society for some cynical sneering as well as publicity, publicly verbally taking apart a faked photo of a fairy so vigorously, even Arthur Conan Doyle (Edward Hardwicke in what must have been a sly “Watson to Doyle” joke from the casting department, as well as a decent idea) doesn’t believe in it anymore. Charles is also acting like an asshole about it, obviously.

For some reason, this performance has impressed audience member Beatrice Templeton (Frances Barber) mightily, and she visits Charles with a photograph she made of her daughter and a fairy only her daughter could see at the time in the woods near her home. There’s certainly a strange shape visible on the photo, but nothing anyone, most certainly not Charles, would find conclusive, so he brushes Beatrice off. Later on, though, he discovers that the fairy-shape is also reflected in the eyes of the child in a way he as a professional wouldn’t know how to fake.

He becomes increasingly obsessed with the photo and the whole fairy idea, a state of mind that will only intensify once he goes to Beatrice’s home and has rather a lot of peculiar experiences.

Directed by Nick Willing, Photographing Fairies is one of two films from 1997 concerning fairy photography. The other one’s a children’s movie, so at least they are very different kinds of movies about the same thing, as is only right and proper. At the beginning and through the middle act, this is a pretty interesting film, centred on Charles’s intense (and nicely portrayed by Stephens) struggle through the kind of intense grief that leaves the survivor with something close to PTSD, and a rational man’s wrestling with the beauties and terrors of faith and scepticism in a much more interesting manner than the usual “faith is awesome” kind of way movies prefer. In fact, in this film, faith is a thing that might kill you, even if the things you do believe are indeed true. Though the film never really decides on the truth or untruth of Charles’s experiences, keeping things a bit too ambiguous for my tastes.

If you’re into this sort of thing – as I obviously am - you will find some of the scenes surrounding the fairy experiences here suggest at least a basic working knowledge of the Edwardian Weird Tale, particular Machen and Blackwood and these authors’ treatment of the numinous and its often destructive influence on the human, a destruction not necessarily wrought from malevolence but humanity’s basic incompatibility with certain aspects of the universe surrounding us.

All of this is at the very least intensely interesting, often more, throughout the first two acts, though someone less fascinated with Edwardian weird fiction, Spiritualism, and the psychological toll of World War I than I am might not get quite as much out of it as I did. In any case, things break down nearly completely in the third act, when the film feels the sudden need to employ a series of increasingly stupid plot developments to get its main character where it wants him to be, losing all plausibility for no visible gain. The last act is further weakened by the decision not to take an actual position on Charles’s new beliefs; I am usually all for ambiguity, but the kind employed here seems wilfully self-destructive more than anything else, not so much occluding the reality of things that may or may not happen but occluding what the film is actually trying to say, which is never a good thing. Also less than helpful is that these late plot developments are based around the behaviour of the husband of Beatrice, one Reverend Templeton, as given by Ben Kingsley in his “I AM BEN KINGSLEY AND I AM GIVING A VERY PHYSICAL AND MUSCULAR PERFORMANCE HERE” mode (all caps clearly his), turning an underwritten character who is probably meant to somehow mirror Charles’s experience of grief in a darker way into a panto caricature of the highest degree, and making all the silly developments surrounding him doubly silly by the sheer ridiculousness of the performance.

Still, Photographing Fairies is an interesting film up to that third act, and afterwards, it’s so puzzlingly ridiculous, it may very well be worth watching for its mind-boggling effect.