A Fantastic Woman
“When I look at you, I can’t make sense of what I see. What am I seeing? A chimera. That’s what I’m seeing,” Orlando’s ex-wife Sonia (Aline Kuppenheim) says to Marina (Daniela Vega), a trans woman mourning her dead lover Orlando (Francisco Reyes), in “A Fantastic Woman,” the new film by Sebastián Lelio. She says it so calmly, so confidently with such chilling certitude that it snaps the whole movie, and the problem it describes, into focus.
In his 2013 film “Gloria,” about a 58-year old woman struggling to assert herself sexually and otherwise in a world where aging people are supposed to be invisible, Lelio gave us a work of art about a person fighting for respect, dignity and self-definition. Now he has done the same thing for another person whose very identity is treated as an affront by those who have no interest in confronting their own limitations: A trans woman.
“A Fantastic Woman” is filled with fantastical elements like these: dreamlike sequences; hallucinatory images; flights of fancy and magic realism. It has been justly celebrated as such, and its star Daniela Vega correctly heralded as such: The fact that she is not only trans but also an actress gave the film an unmistakable authenticity that would have been missing if Lelio had cast someone else in the role. But really, it is one long act of recognition.
We meet Marina on a romantic dinner date with Orlando; they drink and eat and dance and stumble home together and make love. He is much older than her clearly wealthy (he owns a textile mill), while she works as a waitress and moonlights as a singer but then he has an aneurysm on the operating table after she rushes him to the emergency room following his sudden illness. That’s when her trouble begins.
In the hospital, where Orlando has just died, Marina is treated with suspicion by the staff. They call her “he” because her license hasn’t been updated to reflect her gender identity. The police arrive to question her; Orlando had bruises on his body after falling down the stairs during the aneurysm, and there is suspicion of foul play. Was he paying her for sex? they ask but she isn’t granted the respect a grieving wife or girlfriend would be given in that situation. She is immediately ejected from the warm circle of belonging that Orlando represented for her.
So does Sonia (Kuppenheim); so does Orlando’s son (Nicolás Saavedra), who wants Marina out of his father’s apartment. She isn’t allowed to come to the wake or the funeral; she can’t keep Orlando’s dog. Meanwhile, a detective from the Sexual Offenses Unit (Amparo Noguera) visits Marina at work to ask more questions; she forces Marina to come down to the station and submit to a humiliating physical examination but all Marina wants is to be allowed to say goodbye, publicly, with dignity. What happens next is not only predictable but also what always happens: She is not just treated as a second-class citizen; she’s treated as a non Person.
She fights back, though not in ways we’d expect: “A Fantastic Woman” did not need any “I am woman, hear me roar” moments it needed something better than that, and got it. The movie opens with another example of what it means for someone like Marina simply to exist in this world; it ends with an act of defiance far more powerful than anything we’ve seen before because it’s quiet; because it’s truthful; because it shimmers with both hope and fatality.
Lelio takes a soft, empathetic approach to this stuff. However eloquent it may be, it’s also restrained. He pulls in some things from noir from melodrama. While the film itself is largely about Marina’s quest to figure out what a mysterious key she found in Orlando’s things might unlock, the key makes up only part of that sequence. “A Fantastic Woman” is full of color: lights that go from red to green to blue to yellow, bodies soaked in light or drowning in shadow. It’s an amorphous world; where night and day blur together, so do consciousness and unconsciousness.
Cinematographer Benjamín Echazarreta has put Vega at the center of every frame: her face, or the back of her neck, or her whole body as she walks down Santiago streets; sometimes she is viewed from just behind, other times she is viewed from across the street as the camera moves with her past a construction site or down along a block of storefronts; but mostly she is alone in the frame. Santiago often looks emptied out of people here; these choices suggest Marina’s isolation as well as her vulnerable visibility like she’s a walking target.
There are moments when she stares directly at the camera with an even gaze wordless sequences like these throw us headlong into Marina’s experience (in a daringly obvious choice, Aretha Franklin’s “You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman” plays on Marina’s car radio as she goes to meet Sonia; “A Fantastic Woman” does not pull its punches).
Vega is the key to all of this. She’s the one who really lets us into the film’s experience, and it’s her performance that allows us to understand Marina as a character. Sometimes a terrible grief rises up in her eyes when she thinks about losing Orlando, but she has to stuff it down in order to deal with whatever is happening right now. The way she walks is brisk and efficient, but also with tension vibrating around her her shoulders tense and squared off.
There’s a small punching bag that hangs by the door of Marina’s apartment; she throttles it before leaving each morning. Vega shows why Marina bottles up so much stuff just to get through the day. It would be satisfying for her to eventually make a triumphant eulogy speech and win over Orlando’s family, but “A Fantastic Woman” isn’t interested in anything that simplistic. What does it even mean what does it look like for someone to be “a fantastic woman”? Does Marina know? She knew who she was with Orlando; now that he’s gone, she questions everything.
It’s not about a person asserting their right to be treated like a human being; “A Fantastic Woman” is also concerned with Marina’s conflicting ideas about what being a woman means and if she fits into those definitions. She lies in bed, naked, knees folded up under her chin, a round mirror propped on her crotch and looks down at it, at herself looking back up from between her legs. The shot is breathtaking: It brims with poetry and metaphor.
What difference does it make what is located between your legs? Why should it matter so greatly? Why should it matter?
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