Crystal Fairy a long, weird trip in search of awareness
Michael Cera in drug-fuelled Chilean drama
REVIEW
Crystal Fairy Rating: ★★★ out of 5 Starring: Michael Cera, Gaby Hoffmann Directed by: Sebastián Silva Running time: 98 minutes Parental guidance: Subject to classification. (In English and Spanish with English subtitles) Playing at: Metro Cinema at the Garneau: Fri., 9 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m. & 9 p.m. The Chilean film Crystal Fairy is another step in the cinematic un-redemption of Michael Cera, the affably unformed Canadian actor who seems determined to take on a new screen persona: drug-addicted jerk. He plays Jamie, an American tourist in Santiago who lives in his own little bubble of self-realization (Jamie at a party, sampling Chilean cocaine: “It’s actually really good”) and is seeking to open the doors of perception, ideally without opening his eyes.
We meet Jamie with his Chilean friend Champa (Juan Andrés Silva, the brother of writer-director Sebastián Silva) at the party. Champa is more of an accoutrement to the story; along with his brothers Lel and Pilo (also portrayed by Silva brothers), he is part of a laid-back, courteous chorus to the noisy posturing of Jamie and of a girl who calls herself Crystal Fairy (former child star Gaby Hoffmann), whom they see dancing some kind of New Age reverie. “You’re embarrassing yourself,” Jamie tells her. “We’re all one self, man,” she replies. Yikes.
As her name implies, Crystal Fairy is indeed all New Age reverie: she carries magic pebbles to put into everyone’s drink, performs “healing” ceremonies, and shouts “Very bad karma!” in moments of stress. She also has some thoughts about the Mayan calendar: the movie’s full title is Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012.
In a fit of uncharacteristic hospitality, Jamie invites Crystal Fairy to accompany him and the boys on a trip to the north, to a beach past the Atacama Desert, where they plan to take a psychedelic drug derived from the juice of the San Pedro cactus. “This is the perfect thing in my life right now, to do mescaline,” says Jamie, the ugly American chasing selffulfillment.
To their amazement, Crystal Fairy agrees and the next day, having sobered up, Jamie is shocked and upset. He wants to dump her, but the Chileans are too gracious for that.
The film becomes a road trip to awareness, although it’s pretty light on the awareness part and heavier on the dynamics of five mismatched people — three go-with-it citizens and two me-meme visitors — as they drive toward their destinies. Jamie is alternately impatient to get the drug into his system and exasperated with the female guest he has invited along. Crystal Fairy is all about the ceremony of life itself, a spirituality that no one else buys into. When she walks around naked in front of men, they dub her Crystal Hairy.
She and Jamie are two sides of the same coin, a familiar currency to anyone who has an adolescent brush with the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelics. Their values run counter to their professed interest in enlightenment: can there be any worse way to open the doors of perception than to steal the drug that gets you there?
Cera has aged into a more rough-edged personality (he looks as if he could play a young Phil Spector) and Hoffmann, the little girl in Field of Dreams, throws herself wholeheartedly into the hippie confusions of the lost traveller, one of life’s intergalactic orphans.
Crystal Fairy is not exactly a comedy and not exactly a love story, and not exactly an adventure. It’s just karma, man.