This is very nice, I liked it, well done and well acted by everyone. Sure, I wasn’t very fond of the inevitable love story at the end, which is kind of the whole plot, but other than that I really liked it.
Also it was really cute visually: scenery, costumes, vehicles, colours, it was all charming.
The plot:
It’s something like the 1920s. Stanley is a magician, but not many people know that because he has an on-stage-persona and its Chinese, with heavy makeup. He’s very successful and tours the world.
Howard is a childhood friend who always shared his passion, but he never achieved such fame.
Stanley is totally rational, to him everybody who thinks that such things as mediums and powers to contact the dead and such other supernatural gifts are real is simply an idiot.
Stanley only believes in what’s rational, what you can see.
More than once he has uncovered the truth behind some self-proclaimed sensitive, and now Howard goes to meet him after his show in Berlin to tell him that there is a girl, a young pretty American thing, who convinced a wealthy family that she’s the real deal, that she has supernatural powers, that her ‘mental vibrations’ are extraordinary. Howard says he’s tried any way he could think of but has failed to prove how she does her tricks, so he asks Stanley to do it, since he’s so much better… Stanley is really, really conceited, and easily accepts convinced that even if his friend couldn’t understand, he sure will.
He’s also quite rude, having no problem showing clearly what he thinks of people that believe all that stuff, and what he believes of this girl and her powers. Everyone can see how skeptical he is, he makes no mystery of it, even to her.
The real mystery is how and why does this girl fall in love with this guy, who never shows any interest in her at all, and is also rather unflattering and rude and even unpleasant, one might say.
He is intrigued when she speaks of him having connections to a weird Chinese man, of his travels abroad and Berlin in particular, and also when she mentions water and death in relations to a dead uncle of his who drowned… but still he does not believe, he knows it’s not possible.
But then, he takes this Sophie to see his beloved aunt Vanessa, and Sophie can tell them all about the sad love story Vanessa had with a married man who could not leave his wife and so Vanessa never married… :-/
After that, it’s like someone pressed a switch in him, and now Stanley is all mad for her, and even calls the journalists to tell them that she’s the real deal, that he was wrong before. He makes a big deal out of it, pictures and journalists with questions… he didn’t waste any time either, he did it right away. But then, his aunt Vanessa has a car accident and under surgery, apparently. For a moment he thinks that should the worst happen, he would still have Sophie to help him contact his dear aunt, so he wouldn’t lose her, and he even starts praying out loud (being alone in the waiting room of the clinic).
It doesn’t last long that he hears himself and realises what he is doing, and he can’t accept that, he does not believe that there is someone out there who listens to prayers and performs miracles, he only believes in the here and now, what you see is what you get, and after coming back to himself about the prayers, it’s the same about Sophie. He realises now that she cannot be the ‘real deal’, because such a thing is not possible, and therefore sets out to unmask her.
He doesn’t reveal the truth to Sophie and Howard when he next sees them, on the contrary he pretends to still believe in her powers and pretends to leave, but he’s a magician, so he goes out one way and he will reappear on the other side of the room, quietly sitting on a chair, listening to what they say to each other. Sophie asks Howard if he has any regrets, but Howard doesn’t. He resents that although they grew up together with the same dream, practiced the same way and the same amount of time, and acquired the same skill at the same level, Stanley got famous and he didn’t.
Howard is quite happy that he finally got one over the great Stanley Crawford, but then Stanley reveals that he’s right there, hearing everything.
Sophie tells him that he can’t possibly know that it was only the doctors saving Vanessa, and that prayers had no relevance at all, since he was not the only one praying for her, and that he was happy when he thought it was true, when he believed, and that after all they didn’t do anything really terrible, just a prank, but Stanley does not forgive them, does not forgive her. He leaves.
Stanley can’t stop thinking about it. Sophie was so different from him, light and carefree, positive.
Stanley has a fiancee in England, Olivia, who is a beautiful, smart woman, very rational, very organised, the perfect woman for him, he always thought. But now he can’t stop thinking of Sophie’s face.
He admits to his aunt that he might feel something for her, that he might be in love, that he might want to marry her, and that he should therefore hurry up because she just accepted Brice’s proposal, the rich son of the woman she tricked into believing they can communicate with her late husband.
Stanley goes to Sophie and his proposal, if it actually was one, is much much worse than when he played Mr Darcy :lol:
Not once he talks about love, he doesn’t say nice things about her, nothing. He’s quite affronted when she up and leaves him behind.
Stanley goes back to Vanessa to complain that Sophie refused him, that there’s nothing to do anymore, that he loves her so much but she doesn’t want him, and stuff like that, but of course Sophie is there to hear him and accepts now, and they kiss.
Why would she fall for such a rude man? Who kept calling her inferior, saying she was nothing?
That’s what I didn’t like, there was no reason at all, other than she thought he was cute. And he is, sure, but that’s not enough, there’s more than one cute face in the world.
It’s no laugh-out-loud movie, of course, but it has a quiet humour in the dialogues.
