GABY HOFFMAN AND MICHAEL CERA IN CRYSTAL FAIRY

Drug trip

Crystal Fairy is a precisely organized but largely improvised low-budget film by the Chilean director Sebastián Silva (The Maid, 2009; Old Cats, NYFF 2010), based on his own experience. He actually went to the beach with some friends to try a psychedelic cactus, and along the way met an embarrassing yet partly endearing American hippie lady, the "Crystal Fairy" of the title, who joined the party. She's a throwback, trying to foist her retro fairy-dust aura onto everyone she comes across. Silva works on his own small scale in varying but individual ways. His two other features are domestic, since The Maid was about the plight of a grumpy live-in servant ill used by her well-off family and Old Cats concerned a woman's effort to tale control of her aging parent's apartment. Crystal Fairy swings way out into the open.

Silva replaces himself with the Canadian actor Michael Cera, of "Arrested Development, " Juno, and Apatow comedies. Cera had sought out Silva to work with. When their first more serious project ran into trouble, they made Crystal Fairy instead. They had fun. Cera's "Jamie" is more of a real drug tourist than Silva or his several brothers (included as actors here) would have been, more driven and ruthless. First there's a party. This is where Jamie meets Crystal Fairy, and promises, to his regret the next morning, to take her on his drug trip. Then there are cross-dressing whores met that same night, a mere digression. Next day Jamie and Crystal Fairy and the brothers pile into a van and head to the countryside and the beach, seeking the magical cactus for a four-hour head trip. You have to pulp it and boil it and strain it and drink the liquid. It may work or it may not. I guess it's mescaline, though nobody uses that word. It's the San Pedro cactus.

In the current Apatow comedy This Is the End Cera plays a rude debauché getting blow jobs and doing cocaine in the face of the apocalypse. His Jamie might be cut from the same cloth: putatively well-off to be so idle, he's cold and obnoxious, with the relentless sense of purpose of the driven sybarite. In the laid-back world of rural Chile, this ugly North American pushes ruthlessly forward to find the magical cactus whose juice they will trip on, they hope. It's a contest to see how charmingly macho and low-key the Silva brothers can be and how totally annoying Jamie and Crystal Fairy can be.

When the inhabitants of the town where the cactus abounds refuse to come across with any samples of it, Jamie impetuously runs out of the house they're visiting and just steals a big one. This the real-life Silva didn't do. It's a movie, and a movie that chugs along with the choppy rhythms improvisation creates. Silva captures the spaced-out aimlessness of certain kinds of mostly youthful traveler that you might find in lots of places and times. But the paradox is that in his quest of escape from the everyday, Jamie is a total control-freak. This movie dramatizes what it's like to be traveling with someone with the rage to dominate. Who has not been there, the gods have indeed favored.

"Crystal Fairy" is played by Gaby Hoffman, the daughter of Andy Warhol "Superstar" Viva, and a person as idiosyncratic in real life as her on screen version of a wandering American hippie, according to Silva in a Q&A after the screening I attended with a friend on July 15 at IFC Center in New York. She has, surprisingly, been in movies herself since Field of Dreams in 1989.

The beach the group arrives at for their big Trip has an expanse of dunes that provides a quasi-lunar backdrop. I thought fleetingly of Antonioni's L'Avventura and more lengthily of Julia Loktov's The Loneliest Planet (NYFF 2011). The latter is much more of a travelers' bad trip, but it's so highly calculated; Silva's loose improvisation may contain more real danger. One feels things can go seriously wrong at any moment. When they don't, it's a great relief. In the light of Silva and Cera's amiable testimony in the Q&A to their pleasure in a quick, hard shoot, I concluded that Crystal Fairy is a benign experience -- one that catches life on the run with a certain fidelity and delicacy. If Andy Warhol had taken Gaby Hoffman's mother to South America and taken mescaline, they might have made a movie like this.

Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and 2012 (original full title), 98 mins., in English and in Spanish with English subtitles, debuted at Sundance and was shown in half a dozen other festivals, including the SFIFF; opened in NYC, where it was screened for this review, and in LA, on July 12; limited release elsewhere in the US began July 26, 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.