Illusory entertainment

Rating: 7/10 (9 April 2012)

Neil Bunger's 'The Illusionist' most naturally compares with Christopher Nolan's 'The Prestige', two large-budget films about turn-of-the-20th century magicians that came out at around the same time. Neither film is perfect. At times, 'The Prestige' felt unduly mechanical; 'The Illusionist', on the other hand, is arguably easier entertainment, but is in places corny, I don't really understand the bizarre range of accents heard in what is supposedly Viena (some actors speak in a Gemranic English, while others speak pure American) and the plot, though entrancing up to a point, doesn't quite make sense. 'The Prestige' pushed plausibility, and even invented its own laws of physics to explain its story, but it was internally consistent (and indeed, like most good stories, a story of dealing with constraints). 'The Ilusionist' appears, on the other hand, to rely on what seems like genuine magic: at the end, one of the leading characters has a sudden revelation as to how it was done, but the explanation still leaves a lot unanswered. In some ways, films like this one suffer a problem: they leave too little to the imagination. One goes to a show, one thinks one knows what one has seen, and the "magic" is that we have been tricked into having failed to grasp what has really happened. But the neutral, third-person point-of-view of a film seems to make a definitive statement as to what has occurred, so making illusion concrete and at the same time fantastical. This is a flawed film; but still an entertaining one.