Magique! (2008)
Directed by Philippe Muyl

Film Review

Once again, writer-director Philippe Muyl returns with another barrel-load of treacly sentimentality, which this time he liberally scatters around the big open spaces of Canada in his overly sentimental tale of a young boy's friendship with a pair of itinerant clowns.  After a promising start to his career with his amiable adult comedies Cuisine et dépendances (1993) and Tout doit disparaître (1997), Muyl went off towards more childish fare with La Vache et le Président (2000), and has stayed there since, although the success of his 2002 film Le Papillon (2002) shows that there is obviously a market for his brand of generously overdone schmaltz.

As in his previous two films, Muyl anchors his latest film Magique on an unlikely relationship between a child and an adult, in a somewhat awkward attempt to bridge the world of childhood innocence with that of grown-up experience.  Despite one or two inspired touches (including some unaccountably weird surreal interludes), the film is so hideously mired in acute preciousness that it is a chore to sit through, even if it does feature the endlessly adorable Marie Gillain.  Like Muyl's previous screen offerings, this one seems to be aimed primarily at young children and has little appeal to adults, at least not those who are easily turned off by icky homespun narratives steeped in gratuitous saccharine.

Film Synopsis

Ten-year-old Tommy looks up at the sky each night and wonders if his father will ever return.  He has never met his father, but he is sure that he is an astronaut, just as he knows that one day he will come back to Earth to see visit his son.  Otherwise, Tommy's life is pretty uneventful.  He lives alone with his mother Betty on a farm in the middle of the French countryside, miles from anywhere interesting.  Betty is doing her best to keep the farm afloat, but without a man to share her burden it is an uphill struggle.  She keeps her eyes open for a suitable partner, but somehow he fails to turn up.  Like her son, she lives in hope that one day a stranger will enter her life and fulfil her dreams.  She might as well believe in spacemen...

One day, Tommy is excited when he hears that a circus is passing through the area.  Lacking the necessary authorisation, the circus has been barred from the town that was to be its next venue.  Tommy  has the solution: why doesn't the circus settle on his mother's land for a few days?  He easily talks his mother around to agreeing to this plan, and the circus performers are delighted to have found such a convenient spot to stay.  The only problem is that the big top seems to have gone astray in the move, and without this the circus shows cannot go ahead.  As the troupe impatiently awaits the arrival of the missing tent, Tommy gets to forge a lasting friendship with the two clowns, Auguste and Baptiste.  Betty also takes a liking to the clowns, and begins to recognise in one of them the man she has long been waiting for...