Fantasy Life
Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival
Manship Theater
Baton Rouge
Jan. 14-18
What would you do if you lost your job tomorrow? Frantically look for a new one? Strike out on your own? Take some time to finally go on a vacation you’ve been secretly planning in Google Docs since last year?
In “Fantasy Life,” the opening film for the Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival this year, Sam becomes a manny.
“Fantasy Life,” is about a 30- something guy (played by writer and director Matthew Shear) who loses his job as a paralegal and gets recruited to babysit for his psychiatrist’s three grandchildren. The children’s mother Dianne (Amanda Peet) is a struggling actress falling out of her prime and back into her rocky marriage and domestic life, and the two protagonists fall in love.
This is a familiar set up on both sides. Much ink has been spilled about post-firing midlife crisis side quests and the invisibility of women, especially famous women, as they enter their 50s and even age gap relationships. But I find that I don’t mind this mixing of familiar tropes.
Peet and Shear’s characters are compelling. You feel for them and want to root for them. Sam and Dianne are people who aren’t understood by the people in their daily lives. Sam is labeled by his mental health challenges. Dianne’s husband is too distracted by the allure of being the back up for the back up bassist in a band to notice her. It’s easy to get swept up in their versions of reality and ignore the glaring problems with what they’re doing, but taking a step back, it’s like … what are we doing here?
We laugh at the man who gets a cervical fracture driving off in rage after being told that his wife and manny are having an affair, but if the shoe were on the other foot, I don’t think we could. After Me Too, people generally see an older, much more famous and/or powerful man sleeping with a younger woman, especially one he employs, as problematic and fraught with weird power dynamics. But for some reason a woman of the same age and position sleeping with a much younger man is seen as empowerment.
As a viewer, I kept waiting for them to get caught in some dramatic way. But the film is much more character-driven than plot-driven. Sam and Dianne never sleep together. Their affair is emotional more than anything else, and the part where they get caught plays out mostly off-screen. More than anything else, the film forces viewers to reckon with how likability changes their reaction to actions they may find to be self-sabotage at best and reprehensible at worst. Sam being a nice guy or a man in general shouldn’t change right and wrong, but it might change how one feels about it, and that can be weird to realize.
This is the 20th year of the Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival, and the last year it will be in a four-day format due to changes in the way that people consume media. Instead, organizers of the festival will work with the Manship Theater to host one-off screenings when they find films that would have fit into the festival.
At least on opening night, the festival was well attended — at least compared to other screenings I’ve attended both at the Manship and other places in the city. The audience was charitable. They laughed loudly, gasped audibly, and clapped at the end. If I were a filmmaker, I’d want my projects to be shown in a room like that. There’s something about going to the movies together and going on an emotional journey with a room full of strangers, that streaming can’t replace. I hope the festival doesn’t lose that when it changes over to one-off screenings.
