QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM SARAJEVO
Mihrije lives with her conservative Albanian family somewhere in Slovenia. They intend to find her a suitable husband, but our protagonist ferociously rejects the idea. Instead, she spends most of her time with Sina (Mina Milovanović) and Jasna (Mia Skrbinac). Her two friends come from dysfunctional households, with families that either entirely disregard or treat them with disdain. The three young women are non-conformists: they wear baggy clothes and no make-up. None has a boyfriend, and the “lesbian” accolade is occasionally bestowed upon one or two of them.
They meet the loud, flamboyant and vaguely unhinged Fantasy (Alina Juhart), a trans woman entirely clad in pink and with a super-Camp apartment adorned with expensive flower bouquets. Later we learn that she robs the arrangements from the local cemetery at night. Fantasy takes her three friends to night clubs and performs off-the-cuff dance numbers to them in the comfort or her abode. The apparently liberated woman offers them some inspiration, as they break some of the shackles of heteronormativity. It is never entirely clear whether the three cis characters are indeed Lesbians or even bisexual. A discussion around penises reveals that the three friends dream of being a man, while Fantasy wishes she was born with a vagina. This is one of most tiresome cliches bequeathed upon LGBT+ people. Instead of challenging it, Fantasy embraces this phallocratic orthodoxy.
From the outset, the movie explores the possibility that Fantasy is just a figment of Mihrije’s imagination. The 34-year-old director, who also penned the screenplay, seems to ask whether Fantasy’s exuberant persona is just a little too much for Slovenia to handle.
The film sets out to break LGBT+ stereotypes – and to prove that characters are open-minded and fluid – in the film’s only kiss and sex scene. Sadly, the sequence is so poorly staged that it is impossible to take the developments seriously. The action is timid, the actors have no chemistry, the camerawork is mediocre and the colours plain silly (a rainbow in the background adds an extra layer of literalism to the proceedings). All in all, the art direction of Fantasy is extremely clumsy, oscillating between the soulless realism of suburban concrete blocks and colourful, highly saturated teen-dream hues. Virtually all club scenes and dance acts are covered in pink and purple lighting. The ultra-cheesy pop tunes are barely uplifting, but instead a vexing earsore.
Fantasy attempts to convince the women that they should shun their baggy attire and show off their chiselled bodies, only to be told that such suggestion is equivalent to asking her to remove her make-up. This is the film’s most insightful and revelatory dialogue. The director successfully transposes an argument widely used by some Muslim scholars (that the Western woman is imprisoned behind their make-up, and that those who conceal their body are more free) to the LGBT+ world. Fantasy’s responses is genuinely humbling.
Mihrije and Fantasy runs away to her native North Macedonia (the film is a co-production of Slovenia and North Macedonia, the two extreme ends of the now-defunct Yugoslavia). The impoverished nation is far less developed and more conservative than the EU country where most of the film takes place. Fantasy sheds her female clothes and shows up under hear dead name Filip, her relatives assuming Mihrije is “his” bride-to-be. A moment of redemption and reconnection with Fantasy’s elders is possible, as long as there’s music and strobe lights. The scene is remarkably similar to the videoclip of The Knife’s Pass This On, directed by Johan Renck.
The cast is made almost entirely of non-professionals and this shows. A contrived script prevents the aspiring thespians from conveying a sense of spontaneity. Plus they are robbed of love and intimacy, with only two characters being allowed a truly romantic moment. This is a movie that sets out to liberate LGBT+ people in the fast-changing Balkans, more precisely in two countries with a limited LGBT+ tradition in film. Instead, it imprisons them in cold and lifeless stereotypes, devoid of intimate relations.
Fantasy is in the Official Competition of the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival. It also showed in Locarno.
