Fairy Folk Review: Unlike Anything You Would Have Seen Before

A poster of Fairy Folks. (courtesy: rasikadugal)

Its weirdness quotient is extraordinarily excessive however its steadfast resolve to cock a snook at established practices of Bollywood storytelling sits fairly on Karan Gour’s second narrative function Fairy Folks. The quirky and provocative magic realist movie is rooted within the right here and now – within the house of a married couple – even because it wends its method whimsically into uncharted territory.

Working with one of many oldest themes identified to cinema – the man-woman relationship within the establishment of marriage – Gour and his two exceptionally completed lead actors, real-life couple Rasika Dugal and Mukul Chadda, provide you with a free-flowing and affecting dissection of a marital union gone off the rails and struggling to rekindle the spark of yore.

Extra witty than wild, extra rock-solid piquant than hardcore trippy, Fairy Folks is impartial to the core in spirit, substance and execution. To cap all of it, it is not within the least self-conscious in the best way it crafts a wedding story that performs out in a zone the place something is feasible as a result of the actors are free to let their instincts take over as and once they want and the script, written by Gour himself, has room aplenty for innovation.

Gour’s first movie, the critically acclaimed Kshay (2011), too, was set throughout the confines of a wedding. Utilizing understated, even unspoken, strategies, it explored a girl’s craving for one thing that’s past her and her husband’s means. Fairy Folks carries on in just about the identical vein, including a streak of cheeky artistic journey to the enterprise. It’s a delightfully unpredictable train that attracts its energy from a narrative that pushes boundaries and a bunch of actors who waft.

Gour, a music composer and sound designer whose credit (in addition to his personal Kshay) consists of NH10 and Titli, brings his sense of rhythm to bear upon Fairy Folks. It’s mirrored not solely in the best way the movie unfolds but in addition within the numbers that he studs the soundtrack with.

Dugal and Chadda, talking a mixture of English and Hindi in the best way that city {couples} in India do, are completely excellent. They do a superb job of including refined and mightily beguiling layers to performances constructed upon the surprising turns that their jaded relationship takes.

Ritika (Dugal) and Mohit (Chadda) run right into a ‘creature’ on a secluded highway in Mumbai – a totally abandoned house in a megacity is itself a conceit that may exist solely in realms of a quasi-fantastical nature. The creature has human kind, has no genitals, doesn’t transfer till touched and eats mud and worms. All that is till Mohit begins to attract the being out of its stony stupor.

Though the actors – the supporting forged consists of Nikhil Desai because the silent creature (there comes some extent when ‘it’ breaks into completely intelligible Hindi) and Asmit Pathare and Chandrachoor Rai – seem like improvising as they go alongside, what stands out above all the pieces else in Fairy Folks is the firmness of the logic of the phrases they communicate, the actions they carry out and the numerous transformations they bear.

Ritika and Mohit encounter the unusual creature when their automobile breaks down, forcing them depart their personal car and hail a cab on-line – one other metaphor for the couple stepping out of a identified, comfy house. The being follows the couple house.

Breakdown is the operative phrase right here as a result of it is not only a automobile that has stalled. The unexpected and unbelievable scenario that forces Ritika and Mohit to confront a actuality that stares them within the face exterior the protection of their effete environs – they, after all, haven’t any method of realizing what they’re in for – is the important thing twist within the story.

It occurs on the very outset of the movie however the shadow that the encounter casts lasts all by way of the movie. The creature that comes house is the elephant within the room that Ritika and Mohit can now not ignore. However do they actually know what has gone lacking from their lives and that they should deal with it?

It isn’t clear till the movie is about one-third of the best way in that Fairy Folks is a few mildewed marriage that has fallen into the entice of useless behavior. It’s disrupted in ways in which neither the onscreen couple nor the viewers can think about or immediately comprehend. The movie thrives on consistently defying expectation.

On the face of it, there appears to be nothing grievously mistaken with the couple though a palpable frostiness has crept into how they have interaction with one another on a day-to-day foundation. Their phrases recommend a tinge of fatigue. Communication between the 2 appears to ricochet off a hard-to- penetrate wall after which cling imperceptibly within the air round them.

It’s at evening and in the midst of nowhere that Ritika and Mohit discover themselves nose to nose with one thing that shakes up their existence fully. Real affection and keenness – the 2 attributes which have ebbed out of their lives – are pitchforked right into a sequence of tangential and spontaneous discussions of the type that the 2 had stopped having.

It takes a pair of astoundingly untrammelled performances and the help of a secondary forged keenly conscious of the bewildering instructions that the story is heading in to offer form to Gour’s marvellously versatile, fiercely uncompromising strategy to the anti-story on the coronary heart of Fairy Folks.