Fantasy

Director Isabel Pagliai, an ND/NF alum whose previous shorts blended the mental spaces of childhood and mythology, creates a beguiling and very free act of psychological portraiture for her first feature, which won the First Film Award at FIDMarseille. What starts as a documentary profile of Louise, a young French girl whom director Isabel Pagliai met by chance, shifts shape and genre, evoking the protean depths of the subconscious. The film begins with Louise’s diary, found and read aloud by an initially unseen narrator. We meet Louise, and learn her anxieties, in low-resolution video diaries and semi-staged vignettes, chiaroscuro portraits of a restless, sometimes depressive adolescent listening to music, playing with her calico cat, reading news items, or watching videos on her phone in the dark in an empty house that is almost like a doll’s house. And then, what has thus far been a study of a young person’s banal exterior and roiling inner life changes radically, as Louise wakes to find herself in the woods, where she and the narrator—his face now revealed—begin to externalize her psyche in a symbolically fraught setting of play and contested innocence.