MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Magic Toyshop’ a Mesmerizing Tale for Adults

A gorgeous, strange and mesmerizing fairy tale for adults, “The Magic Toyshop” (at the Nuart for one week) gets its power from the clarity with which novelist-screenwriter Angela Carter re-creates that tantalizing state between girlhood and adolescence.

A mixture of innocence, allure, tremulousness, prudery and seduction, it’s a moment as exquisite as “magic hour” just before sunset and as quickly gone.

That age, with all its caprices, is captured perfectly by beautiful 15-year-old Caroline Milmoe, who plays Melanie, eldest of three well-off English children whose parents are traveling in America in the late 1930s. Melanie, whose room is full of prints of turbaned odalisques and Botticelli’s Venus, is in a swoon of adolescence.

She’s sensualist enough to revel in the sight of herself in a full-length mirror, deciding that her breasts will never be as perfect as at that moment; little-girl enough to clatter down to breakfast a second later in a shapeless smock.

The day after Melanie slips into her mother’s satin wedding dress and steals out into the bluish-white moonlight, a goggled motorcyclist arrives with a telegram. (To movie lovers he conjures up Lawrence of Arabia on his fatal ride, or Cocteau’s motorcycled messengers from Hades. All in all, good news is not on the way.)

It is part of screenwriter Carter’s and director David Wheatley’s tact that we are not there when Melanie reads the telegram. Instead, the nanny, full of foreboding, comes home to find feathers floating from under the door--feathers from a quilt and pillow that Melanie has savaged in her agony at the news that her parents have been killed in a plane crash.

Full of the theatrical self-absorption of her age, she carries a feeling of guilt: Somehow she has brought on this tragedy by tearing and bloodying her mother’s wedding gown climbing home through an upstairs window.

White feathers, a wedding dress stained with blood, a white swan glimpsed downstairs at the family house, an immense white puppet-swan at the film’s climax; these and dozens more symbols run like veins through “The Magic Toyshop,” a Jungian’s dream and not exactly a film lover’s nightmare either. (It’s not, however, a place in which to browse with young children: Its Times Mature rating is for its brief nudity and sexual innuendo.)

Melanie, her sweet, sea-obsessed younger brother, Jonathan (Gareth Bushill), and their little sister, Victoria, are shipped to their only living relative, the tyrannical Uncle Philip (Tom Bell), in a seedy London suburb. Philip, a toy maker, lives with his exquisite young Irish wife, Margaret (Patricia Kerrigan), who has been mute since their wedding, and with Margaret’s two younger brothers, the flame-haired, big-eyed Finn (Kilian McKenna), Uncle Philip’s apprentice, and the fiddle-playing Francie (Lorcan Cranitch).

In outline, “The Magic Toyshop” may sound like the beginning of an E. Nesbit children’s classic, but it’s far closer to Carter’s own short story “The Company of Wolves,” which was made magical on the screen by director Neil Jordan.

“Toyshop” is less a film of sexually charged transformations, man into wolf, than one with magical, spellbinding effects: Finn, teaching Melanie how to play Leda for Uncle Philip’s bizarre private tableaux, tells her to take off her shoes and as she does, the sea rushes over her feet and becomes the carpet in her bedroom, which gradually becomes the oceanside itself. There are dozens such moments sprinkled throughout “The Magic Toyshop,” including a wonderful bull terrier (Tom Bell’s animal counterpart) who appears and disappears from his portrait on the wall. Marvelous stuff.

Actually, “Toyshop” is even more Irish than “Company of Wolves.” Aunt Margaret, with her mysterious silver choker-necklace and her flowing red hair, looks like a queen of Ireland from centuries past--and could be just that. And the tormented Finn, a painter with surrealist leanings, who will be the first to stir Melanie’s inchoate sexual daydreams, has a gorgeous gift for talk: He accuses Melanie of “tormentin’ her hair into those plaits” that ruin her beauty. (As though anything could even cast a shadow on it.)

The entire family lives in fear of Uncle Philip, whose fixation on his puppet shows in the toy-cluttered basement is increasingly creepy and perverse, done with life-size puppets with only family members as audience. It’s there that he forces Melanie into playing Leda to his huge puppet swan. Bell, who was Emily Lloyd’s seducer in “Wish You Were Here,” makes Uncle Philip’s malevolence complex, yet oddly compassionate.

In addition to Bell, it is the best cast imaginable, from the yearning Melanie to the puckish Finn. British director David Wheatley, a veteran at Granada Television, debuting as a feature director, began as a painter and sculptor, which explains the film’s almost sinfully rich decor, full of puppets, old dolls, mechanical marvels and wind-up treasures. This is an art director’s playground, with an antique toy collection better even than the puppets and theaters of “Fanny and Alexander” and probably 100 times more artfully dense.

Screenwriter Carter’s blithe use of incest to tie up plot ends may raise a few eyebrows, Melanie’s included. You have the feeling she’ll adjust with amazing speed, possibly even faster than the audience.

‘THE MAGIC TOYSHOP’

A Roxy Releasing Co. presentation of a Granada Television production. Producer Steve Morrison. Director David Wheatley. Screenplay Angela Carter from her own novel. Designer Stephen Fineren. Camera Ken Morgan. Editor Anthony Ham. Music Bill Connor. Costumes Hilary Buckley. With Tom Bell, Caroline Milmoe, Kilian McKenna, Patricia Kerrigan, Lorcan Cranitch, Gareth Bushill, Georgina Hulme.

Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.