"Fantasy Love" is Dolan's second feature film. The style continues the style of the debut film "I Killed My Mom". It is beautiful and romantic, with a lot of slow motion and overwhelming lens rendering. The rift caused by miscommunication between mother and son described in I Killed My Mom has nothing to do with the final reconciliation, but its spiritual core is still the color of the human heart. The story of "Fantasy Love" is extremely simple. Francis (Xavier Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chaucory) fall in love with a man named Nicolas (Nils Schneider) at the same time at a dinner party. ), both of them are convinced that Nicolas is in love with them, but it's just their fantasy. Dolan made the illusion of the two people exquisitely exquisite, and the ambiguous air between the three people was vividly expressed by the director's endless close-up shots of limbs: provocative eyes, gentle fingertips, the insteps clinging to each other when they woke up in the morning, The cotton candy handed to his mouth... In addition to the ambiguous physical behavior, what is more moving is the raging soundtrack in the film, accompanied by the music of "bang bang", of course, what I think of is my own youth. I also secretly liked a person who gave me things that I can easily count even today: a string of candied haws, a pebble fished out of a small pond on campus, a small box of his grandmother's own fried tea leaves, and a long letter, I sucked the sugar-coated haws as if sucking his fingers, covered the stone day and night as if stroking his face, and read his letter as if he was whispering in my ear. This is the ultimate form of secret love, hopelessly searching for his traces in an empty and uninteresting life, his traces and even his taste, every little action of his is endlessly magnified in his heart, his eyes A butterfly flapped its wings and set off a hurricane in my world. Yes, so when I look at Francis who is masturbating while sniffing the aftertaste of Nicolas's clothes, I feel very distressed; when I look at Francis who only gets the sentence "Why do you think I'm gay" after confessing, I feel heartbroken; and Standing on the street nervously rushed down to ask Nicolas Marie, went to the supermarket to buy a pack of marshmallows to pay the bill, and couldn't wait to open the package to eat marshmallows... Those moments of crushing crush are like Francis' bathroom wall The red crosses on the top are just engraved in my heart.
I quite liked the ending of the movie, Francis and Marie looked at the other boy in the red hat blowing smoke rings, the boy saw them too, smiled and winked at them, they walked towards him together, Another round of fantasy love begins. They will probably still be the same as this time, wanting to make a statement, jealous, arguing, quarreling, and even confessing, and finally run to another boy in a woolen hat without a hitch. I like this ending because Dolan really captures the feeling of a crush, which is not a thing, it's a feeling, and what he did with Audrey Hepburn, with James Dean, with new wave movies and The fascination with avant-garde painting is the same. In this story, even the object of love—the boy who looks like a classic David—doesn’t matter. What matters is the unease in the crush, the self-doubt, and the infighting with the imaginary enemy. This is what Dolan thinks to perform. If "I Killed My Mom" is a screen presentation of Dolan's self-experience, "Fantasy Love" is more of Dolan's emotional transmission. In this film, you can feel vague pain and sadness, vagueness The provocation and sexual suggestion can better substitute for the character's feelings.
I've always been hostile to the statement that "the most important thing in a movie is to tell a good story." Film has always been a literary form supported by audio-visual language, and the most important thing is still the feeling of sight and hearing. The reason why I like Dolan is because his films give me an excellent audio-visual experience, and through this experience I can feel the emotions he wants to convey - ambiguous, heart-wrenching, heart-ache, all these feelings after watching the film I feel It's like experiencing it once. The room irrigated by wanton colors is loneliness, the smoke ring exhaled by the beloved boy under the slow-moving camera is heartbeat, the slightly throbbing nose tip is anxiety, and the calf clinging to his toes is joy. Looking at the pictures under Dolan's lens, I can feel that the film is trying to communicate and have a dialogue with me, instead of simply making up stories and creating sweet sensationalism, but trying to express a truth. This kind of truth is touching.
Compared with the amazingness of watching "I Killed My Mom" back then, Dolan's second work looks a little bit worse. It's still the same slow motion, the same Wong Kar Wai-style music. The insane talent in My Mom. In Dolan's debut novel, he has a strong desire for expression, whether it's the imaginative sex scene between the hero and his boyfriend, or the exaggerated painting of anger after a fight with his mother, including him curled up in the bathtub. The metaphors of returning to the mother's womb are all eye-catching. In this work, he seems to have returned to a safe position, and carefully doodled a careful secret love story, but he is sincere. The actor interview-style narration interspersed in the film corresponds to the black-and-white video DV recorded by the protagonist himself in the previous film; Dalida's "Bang Bang" after the French sad song is emotional but not as rich as the soundtrack in the previous film; the charming Quebec in the film The lakeside scenery and the gorgeous maple leaves are the same as in the previous work. Dolan is doing a kind of repetition in "Fantasy Love," a stylistic re-enactment that I love so much, but it's always lacking the ubiquitous sparkle of the debut novel. Surprisingly, Nicolas' mother suddenly appears when Francis is masturbating in the movie, and then the two of them have a conversation that shows Dolan's cold humor and bad taste that has never been shown before.
The movie opens with the motto, "Truth is: love without reason." Just as Francis and Marie fall in love for no reason and move on to the next doomed love for no reason, neither do I. Reasonably in love with Xavier Dolan.
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