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See you later, prestidigitator

Michael Caine as Cutter and Hugh Jackman as Angier
  • Posted at 2:29pm
  • 07 December 2007
  • by AndrewCollins-RT

Christopher Nolan's tale of duelling Victorian magicians, The Prestige, begins with a fine explanatory passage from Michael Caine. To paraphrase: every great magic trick consists of three parts. The first is "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards or a bird. The second is "The Turn", where he takes the ordinary and makes it do something extraordinary, like disappear. But the hardest part is the third, in which he has to bring it back – that's "The Prestige".

Movie-making pulls off a similar trick. As any screenwriting course will tell you, equilibrium must be shattered by something unexpected and the status quo must be reinstated.

Unfortunately, films that take elaborate stage illusion as their subject score an own goal. The appeal is trying to work out how a trick – in The Prestige's case, "The Transported Man" (woooh!) – is done. But when you watch a film, nothing is as it seems. Moving pictures are themselves an illusion, and today's digital effects further muddy the waters between reality and magic. Thus, a story built around uncovering the mechanics of a trick lacks its own "Prestige".

So, why have we seen a recent glut of films about magicians? The aforementioned, plus The Illusionist (more turn-of-the-century prestidigitation with Edward Norton), and Mitchell and Webb's Magicians, which at least played the subject for laughs, not period pomposity.

Perhaps, in a media-saturated world of spin and hype, it reflects a yearning for Victorian values, the thrill of old-fashioned stagecraft as opposed to the computer-assisted trickery that modern movies rely on. Which brings us back to the same problem. No cinema audience is going to gasp at the sight of a rabbit pulled from a hat. Nor wonder how it's done. And, in the words, or thereabouts, of Paul Daniels, "that's tragic!"

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