"LOUISE" IN FANTASY

ISABEL PAGLIAI: FANTASY (2025) - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS

The musings of a young woman, young man in the background

This quiet, artisanal French effort exhibits the French taste for voiceovers. Most of it is a portrait of a young woman. She is plain, unadorned, but voluble and open about herself, and apparently a budding writer or diarist. There are images of a notebook held open, full of handwriting, presumably hers. A smaller notebook appears later containing her pensées. Toward the end, she recalls an unpleasant coupling, possibly her first sexual experience, consisting of anal intercourse after she is invited into a man's room when she is quite drunk. Before that, she has described at some length how she masturbates.

Louise, the girl's name, is seen first soaking in a bathtub and musing. There's a witty shot of the bidet in which her calico cat reposes, seemingly putting on different expressions to go with the thoughts of her talkative mistress.

Once dressed, with her plain black hair and crew neck outfit Louise resembles an eastern college girl of the fifties. The intense color of the cinematography makes her skin look a bit blotchy, but she has big white perfect teeth, seen several times when she smiles, and when she laughs uproariously toward the end of the film at the humorous, melodramatic musings - offscreen again - of Thomas.

Now who is Thomas? At first we don't know, but it's his voice that alternates, voice-off, with that of Louise, partly also reading from her diary. The director teases us with Thomas, making him only a voice for half the film, then keeping him often in the shadows, and never letting him revel in his own personal musings as Louise gets to do.

In notes about the film on Facebook, we learn that Thomas has found Louise's notebook on a train and been entranced by her as " a young woman caught between ghosts and fantasies." Somehow thereafter he sought her out. Or perhaps she was right there on the train?

Thomas, anyway, provides somewhat sexless male backup and contrast. He is a dark young man with sharp, angular, somewhat poetic features. The word "Corsican" is mentioned. When Louise talks about a "philosophical friend" who gave her advice about her poetry-writing, he is very curious and finally when he asks "Is he Corsican?" she laughs and says yes. So maybe he is too.

Louise's color is blue. Thomas' color is red. She wears jeans and a b blue pullover; her wears a scarlet red shirt, dramatic against his dark skin. Midway in the film a third color appears in a multitude of shadows: the deep greens of a woods full of rich plants and tall dark trees where Louise and Thomas gambol about, amorous friends or sexless lovers. There is a stream, and another good shot is one of big smooth dark rocks: two lean handsome dogs leap up on them, and one dog remains, at attention as the shot is held.

The atmosphere this film creates is a nice one: generally peaceful. The ND/NF blurb describes Louise as "a young French girl whom director Isabel Pagliai met by chance," and describes the woods as "a symbolically fraught setting of play and contested innocence." Some viewers may be entranced by Louise, the woods, and Thomas. Thomas seems a little under-used, though, and you may feel that the relationship lacks elements, whether aesthetic, romantic, sexual, poetic, or philosophical, necessary to provide the intensity or the beauty that the images and monologues tantalizingly hint at. And all this is in the absence of the "normal" thoughts, background, and plot elements of, say, an Éric Rohmer film. Rohmer has famously been referred as like "watching paint dry," but his oeuvre winds up providing an immense amount of material to chew on.

But this is all about Louise. Toward the end, she takes over again with her recollection of being anally penetrated at the end of a drunken night. This time her words again are voice-off, because we don't see her. But instead we see a cascade of stills of people in odd costumes and odd poses, with lots of lipstick on their faces and pale skin. The images flash by at brain-numbing speed. It's an unusual sequence. But it leaves one somewhat cold. The Guardian review by Phuong Le ("A Modern Ophelia Swamped by Audiovisual Overwhelm") suggests that this assault may be made up by Louise, and that the cascade of images may be created by AI. If so, then a climactic moment is only Papier-mâché, though Lee takes an underwater moment as linking Louise with Ophelia.

Fantasy is a playfully eclectic mix of minimalist docu-fiction, monologue, and teasing fairytale. It also wants to hint at myth; and when one thinks of myth-making with a Mediterranean girl and boy, one of them dark, roaming a beautiful woods, Manuel Pradal's 1997 Marie Baie des Anges springs to mind with its real local girl and boy and its weaving of classic American and Nouvelle Vague elements into a doomed, lush, gorgeous erotic fairytale. Fantasy has its own mix of elements but seems relatively slim fare, promising and tactile in its images though it undoubtedly is.

Fantasy/Fantasie, 79 mins., premiered at FID Marseille, winning the First Film award. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, which has previously featured the director's shorts. ND/NF Showtimes:
Thursday April 9
6:00pm at MoMA, Titus Theater 2 – Q&A with Isabel Pagliai
Saturday, April 11
3:15pm at FLC, Walter Reade Theater – Q&A with Isabel Pagliai

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.