Charming (Erik Mathew) lives in a fairytale land where mediocrity
roles, and if you excel in something, anything, you are automatically
labelled a freak. This is a bad thing, because Charming has always been an
A-student, eloquent and, well, charming - very unlike his lame-brained
brother Chuck (Ajay Vidure), whom everybody regards as the epitomy of
virtue due to his mediocrity. One day, lovely Jade (Arloa Reston) falls
ill, and only the kiss of someone who loves her can save her life (accept
it, because hey, it's a fairytale) - but the mediocrity of the whole
comunity has long bred apathy, and thus nobody cares enough to kiss, to
love, or to even save a life. Only Charming cares, kisses the maid, and
for him it's love at first sight, er, kiss. Everyone else though thinks he
has made a fool of himself and embarrassed the girl, and even she
at first reacts far from grateful. Only later, she agrees to meet him, at
midnight, at the fountain ... That night, the fountain: With the
approaching midnight, Charming grows more and more nervous, so much so
that he eventually asks Chuck for advice ... which almost leads to
disaster, because instead of giving her his skillfully written loveletter,
he reacts to her with total apathy following Chuck's suggestion and sends
the woman he loves away, throwing her back into a life of mediocrity and
himself with her ... until a little cupid hands her his loveletter after
all, and Jade rushes back to him and throws herself into his arms -
because, as the two of them only now learn, it's ok to be charming ... Charmning
is, as the title suggests, charming, and not for telling another fairytale
lovestory but for turning the genre onto its head and let it make fun of
itself. That's not the whole trick of the movie though, because everybody
with an ounce of humour can make fun of the fairytale formula. Charming
isn't taking the route of obvious jokes though but uses subtle humour to
deconstruct the formula stone by stone, then put it back together in a
cute but not cheesy way. That all said, it's probably a good thing that Charming
isn't any longer than 15 minutes, because its brand of humour would
possibly have run dry pretty soon, but that's only to say that the short
format is the exactly right format for the film. Recommended.
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