If you are a night clerk at a one-star hotel in Le Havre, and an ordinary-looking woman in pink sweatpants shows up at the front desk and announces that her name is Fiona and she is a fairy, what would you do? Dom (Dominique Abel), a quiet man whose expression frequently conveys exasperated wonderment, does what most of us wouldn't do: He listens politely to her offer to grant him three wishes and gives her a room. Later, after Fiona (Fiona Gordon) has saved him from choking, he takes her up on those wishes — two of them, anyway — and a whimsically deadpan friendship/love affair has begun.

"The Fairy," written and directed by Abel, Gordon and Bruno Romy (who plays another hotel client, an Englishman with a phrase book and a little dog), unfolds in a way that's always unexpected. You never have the slightest idea what these characters will do next, particularly when Dom and Fiona start performing a charmingly gawky underwater ballet at the beach, complete with floating plastic bags for chorines.

It's a slight film, and it's over just as you're thinking it should be, but it's both sweet and refreshingly tart (Fiona is taken to a psychiatric hospital, as a would-be fairy might well be) — and leaves you believing, if not in fairies, at least in a little bit of magic.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com