A competitive entry in the Filmmakers of the Present program of the Locarno Film Festival’s 78th edition, Fantasy, the feature directorial debut from Slovenian musician and director Kukla, at times credited as Katarina Bogdanović, is a hypnotic, surreal expansion of the story the filmmaker initially sketched in her award-winning short film Sisters, featuring the same three performers — Sarah Al Saleh, Mina Milovanović, and Mia Skrbinac, with the latter being the lone professional actress — that played the protagonists in Fantasy.
Shifting between present-day Slovenia and North Macedonia, the movie follows three tomboys in their early twenties wrestling with notions of femininity in a social environment shaped by rigid constructs. Mihrije (Al Saleh) refuses to accept the fixed marriage offered by her parents and be with a man she barely knows. Then there is the short-tempered Sina (Milovanović), who seems to be the most enthusiastic about boxing, dreaming of being a coach in the future. Jasna (Skrbinac), meanwhile, is the one that glues the group together, yet she also hopes to forge a new life away from her dismissive mother (Silvija Jovanović). As they put up with the conservative confines of their Balkan neighborhood, all three of them will soon embark on a journey of desire, kinship, and self-discovery in an attempt to breach a kind of social and existential impasse.
That journey will be propelled by a chance encounter with Fantasy (played with devastating affection by Alina Juhart), a transgender woman and sex worker en route to fully embracing her personhood. In an instant, Mihrije is enamored of Fantasy and the sense of being that she unabashedly expresses, at least on the fringes of Ljubljana. Their special bond leads the two of them to a trip to North Macedonia, as Fantasy grieves her dying father and the self that she has to numb in front of her relatives, who still see her as a man and refer to her by her deadname, Filip. Jasna, who is mostly quiet and watchful, is also inspired by Fantasy to make more active decisions and take risks for herself instead of waiting for something to happen. Out of the three young women, Sina is the most distant from Fantasy, making a fuss at one point about how the latter loves to put on makeup, but Fantasy has also extended her confidence to be in touch with her softer side, though perhaps not in an ideal way as she enters an affair with her kickboxing coach, Boris (Denis Porčič), who is married and has his own family.
Fantasy is a coming-of-age movie that plumbs the depths of desire, gender, and the constant making and unmaking of the self amidst patriarchal defaults and a constricting social geography, insistent in the way radical connections can truly transform a person. With the narrative chiefly mounted as episodic glimpses, Kukla uses a multi-sensory technique, where Relja Ćupić’s score that moves between electronic and atmospheric, Julij Zornik’s immersive sonic manipulations, and Lazar Bogdanović’s slick and porous cinematography, taking advantage of the urban palette, natural light, and the fascinating shades of lilac, rounded out by Lukas Miheljak’s deft editing, steep the picture in a kind of sophisticated, ethereal world.
Obviously informed by Kukla’s background as a director for music videos, Fantasy also insists on surrealist symbolism, as readily declared by its opening frame, which doesn’t feel tacked-on or out of sync with the film’s emotional landscape. These visual attributes serve as byways through which the film accesses its characters’ interiority and consciousness, and navigates its articulation about how identity is not fixed and instead forever in flux, enhanced by the dynamic performances of its mostly non-professional cast.
While something has to be said about how Kukla’s writing can still magnify, if not even out, the conflicts faced by the protagonists, what’s impressive about Fantasy is that it doesn’t reduce its titular character to the demands of its plot, or project her as a mythical figure to service a cathartic finish, though it seems to be her initial draw. The movie steadily negotiates with Fantasy’s own journey of becoming: the compromises she makes to remain in the good graces of her relatives, the routine acts of microaggression she endures, and how her view of femininity contrasts, or perhaps enriches, the trio’s view of it. Notice that nowhere in the movie does Kukla lean on a kind of medico-surgical lens through which she can frame the trans experience, nor does she have to resort to a crime angle, given that Fantasy is an erotic laborer. She is able to traverse the contours of Fantasy’s personhood, without sanitization, without superficiality, without forgoing character dimensions. Fantasy is not just a cipher for us; contrary to her lived name, she’s real — she lives and breathes and makes silly choices.
There’s also a detail in the movie that sharply captures the knotty layers of transphobia: Fantasy mentions how she’s been constantly drawn to “chasers,” a term for cisgender people who are often sexually invested in trans people. Later in the movie she notes that she recognizes Sina’s coach and one of the girls’ brothers, though she doesn’t explain how. These men, as the detail suggests, publicly deride and label Fantasy as a “freak,” yet privately, they’re attracted to her body and beauty. It’s a dehumanizing trap that trans people casually deal with: the trans body as an object, the allure of the Other. It’s a minor detail that the viewer can swiftly overlook, but it is this kind of attention from Kukla that gives the narrative a curious and complex texture.
Indeed, there’s a fantasy — psychological, political, social, and cultural — at the movie’s heart that it intimates but at the same time shatters, with its shrewd sense of craft and tender eye for storytelling. Heteronormativity, it argues, is a dull illusion.
Fantasy recently played at the Locarno Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Locarno site for the title.
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