Crystal Fairy (18) 98 mins ***
Chilean writer-director Sebastián Silva here follows 2009’s sly
social satire The Maid with this
gently subversive road trip, a younger, scruffier sibling to Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También. A newly dopey Michael Cera is the chauvinist
partyhound whose plans of doing mescaline in the Atacama desert with his
travelling companions are hijacked by hippychick Gaby Hoffmann; she’s soon
confounding everyone with her advocacy of karmic cleansing and female body
hair. Crucially, the gag isn’t that she’s some aberrant freak, but that these
little boys don’t know how to react to her – and Hoffmann’s nudity is so
self-assuredly confrontational it’s scant surprise she’s since been tapped to
appear on TV’s Girls. Stretches of
improv with passers-by means the film can resemble one of those What the
Director Did on His Holidays doodles, yet its breeziness is oddly warming:
Silva’s open to the elements in ways his blinkered protagonist only claims to
be.
Crystal Fairy opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on January 27.
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