A ‘fantaisie’ is a product of the imagination, but also an illusion, a phantasmagoria: a ghost. Fantaisie, Isabel Pagliai’s first feature-length film, follows closely — intimately — the life of a young girl, Louise, through her thoughts, her conversations with herself, and the texts she writes in her small notebooks, which she reads and recites throughout the film. We learn almost nothing concrete about Louise: barely her first name, and how she fills her idle hours. But that hardly matters, for Fantaisie is not a portrait in any conventional sense, but rather a doorway into another space. As in Tendre, her previous and mesmerising short film, Pagliai ventures into the darkness of images and of the everyday, searching within that darkness for the cracks where emotion breaks through, where the light fades and gives way to a possible world already latent in this one. A stretch of woodland — presumably close to Louise’s home — becomes the site of her meetings with Thomas, though it is never clear whether these encounters are real or imagined. In this fissure, desire, raw emotion, and life itself surge up. As the film progresses, dream increasingly overlays reality, and logic slips away into a realm where the imaginary can be explored: a dream. A ghost. Or as Louise herself writes: “Indeed, that’s it — it’s feeling love that matters, sensing that it exists, that it surrounds us, that it passes through us, that it’s here, that it does something to us.” (Gonzalo de Pedro — FID)
