This is our review of ‘Fairyland’ from its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival 2023. It contains mild spoilers.
Few filmmakers pin down the coming-of-age experience quite like Sofia Coppola. From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, she understands intimately the melancholy and madness of growing up. It makes sense, then, that her latest project sees her return to familiar ground: She is the producer of Andrew Durham’s Fairyland, an 80s-set coming-of-age movie about a girl and her queer father, and how their relationship and reliance upon each other changes during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco.
In a hippie-like queer commune in mid-70s San Francisco, a young girl named Alysia (played at this age by Nessa Dougherty; later by Emilia Jones) is sandwiched between exuberantly dressed folk at a house party, dabs of acid being placed upon everyone’s tongue except hers. It is her birthday: she is in the throes of her most innocent and impressionable years — no older than six or seven — but instead of being shielded from the world, her recently-widowed father has opted to teach her about a society he himself has long been starved of. Her father, a spectacled, moustached writer named Steve (Scoot McNairy), also present at the party, had been in a monogamous relationship with Alysia’s mother until she died in a tragic car crash a few years ago, but now, he’s having short and blissful affairs with men, in a world so far from the white picket fence life they once lived. He could have regressed into a lonely space, or found a way to rebuild the conventional set-up his daughter was used to. But this opportune moment is taken by her father to start again, and create a world for them both shaped by personal truth.
This scene — lifted from Fairyland, a new film that premiered last weekend at the Sundance Film Festival, directed by Andrew Durham and produced by Sofia Coppola — kickstarts an ever-evolving and near decades-long story. It’s about the love shared between a complicated father with messy, if good intentions, and a daughter whose appreciation of her father’s decisions oscillates from innate understanding to resentment. As a child, living with drug dealers and femme queens, a wandering Alysia crawls under the covers next to her father in bed, his male lover quietly occupying the other side. But as she grows up, becoming a teenager, she struggles to reckon with who he is: in one scene, she comes home from school incensed and angry, bitterly shouting slurs at her father and his new lover.
Their relationship may be ever-shifting, shaped by open-hearted embrace one day and painful dejection the next, but there is something moving constantly closer to them, its danger never rescinding. As Alysia grows up, ready to explore a world wide open to her as she moves to New York for college, the AIDS crisis creeps closer. Suddenly, the years spent being spiritually raised by her father are about to turn in on themselves. The fun and freedom ends, and Alysia has to return: she’s the only one left to care for her father when the virus eventually, inevitably, enters their home.
The film is an adaptation of Alysia Abbott’s 2013 memoir, which the Coppola family production company American Zoetrope bought the screen rights to shortly after publication. At the time, Sofia said in a statement: “I love the book Fairyland; it’s a sweet and unique love story of a girl and her dad, both growing up together in 1970s San Francisco. I think it will make an engaging and touching movie on a subject I’ve never seen before.” At that stage, Sofia started writing a script for it, one she later co-wrote with the film’s now director Andrew Durham — known best for his iconic set photography for Sofia’s films. Andrew later became the sole writer and director of the film, a welcome decision, Alysia said, owing to his relationship to the story – his father died of complications relating to AIDS.
The movie is gorgeous. An inspiring look at the AIDS crisis from a seldom-seen perspective. Emilia Jones, fresh from her BAFTA nomination for her part in another Sundance hit, CODA, together with Scoot McNairy’s Steve, mine the minutiae of what it means to care for one another, and bring their characters to the screen with a real and assiduous depth.
Fairyland is a more conventional coming-of-age film than the work Sofia Coppola normally puts her name to, but that feels intentional in a way. As time distances us from the peak of the AIDS crisis, the numbers and images associated with the era become vague and mirage-like; an abstract rather than a reality. Today’s generation don’t have their Rock Hudson or their Freddie Mercury — the beauty of science has changed such fates. But what Fairyland does is remind us that, within those statistics, there were families. There were real people with children who watched over them, and cared for them as they grew sick and died. It’s a harrowing thought, but by pairing it with this story of Alysia’s burgeoning life alongside her father’s dwindling one, Fairyland reminds of the resilience and effort that’s often required to really show someone that you love them. The film is heartbreaking and tender; an important work of art about the AIDS crisis that will educate those who haven’t had to know about it, and strike a chord with those who knew it all too well.