Una mujer fantástica

Sebastián Lelio (2017)

Much of the audience will have an idea beforehand of the subject and, perhaps, of the basic plot of Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman – foreknowledge that will tend to obscure the dramatic skill of its opening.  Lelio (who also wrote the screenplay, with Gonzalo Mazo) focuses at first not on the title character but on Orlando Onetto (Francisco Reyes), as if he were going to be the protagonist.   This increases the shock of his sudden disappearance from the film, twenty minutes or so in.  By that point, we know that Orlando, a Chilean businessman in late middle age, is in a relationship with Marina Vidal (Daniela Vega).  We first see her performing in a singing trio in a Santiago nightspot; Orlando watches from a table for two; when Marina comes off stage and joins him there, the servers sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her.   She and Orlando celebrate the occasion with plenty of drink before going back to his apartment and to bed.  Orlando wakes up feeling seriously unwell.  As Marina prepares to get him to a doctor, he falls down a staircase in the apartment building.   Shortly after admission to hospital, he dies, of a brain aneurysm. 

Lelio uses respiration to move from Orlando to Marina as the main character – the heavy breathing of the couple’s lovemaking, Orlando’s breathlessness as he becomes ill, Marina’s hyperventilation as she tries to absorb the shock of her lover’s death.  From this point onwards, Marina is entirely the centre of attention – literally so, as the camera repeatedly focuses on her.  The narrative crystallises around a single theme:  Marina’s treatment – by the hospital staff, the police and Orlando’s family – as a transgender woman.  That treatment is mostly discriminatory and ranges from lack of understanding to physical abuse.  There are a couple of scenes involving Marina’s sister Wanda (Trinidad González) and her partner Gaston (Néstor Cantillana), who are supportive, even though they’re sometimes preoccupied arguing with each other.  Marina also pays a visit to her affable singing teacher, who notes that he’s training her for more than salsa and merengue numbers.   Except for Orlando’s dog, which she makes determined attempts to hold on to after his death, Marina is socially isolated.  She is fighting a lonely, gallant battle against transphobic prejudice, and to assert her female identity.

A Fantastic Woman is an involving and, on its own terms, an effective drama.  Sebastián Lelio intentionally and repeatedly blurs the two responses that sympathetic viewers will keep having to the events of the story:  ‘It’s terrible how Marina is treated’ and ‘It’s terrible how trans people are treated’.   At the hospital, a police officer, addressing her as ‘miss’, asks to see Marina’s identity card.  As he looks at the ID, Marina explains that the process of updating her gender details is ongoing:  the policeman starts calling her ‘sir’.  The point is made neatly but wouldn’t an officer of the law feel bound to take this literal-minded approach[1]?  More significant are Marina’s encounters with Orlando’s widow Sonia (Aline Küppenheim).  The first time they meet in person, Sonia remarks that Orlando was old enough to be Marina’s father; she also refers to her as a ‘chimera’ and says that ‘when I look at you I don’t know what I’m seeing’.  The delivery of that line establishes Sonia’s transphobia, lodges in the audience’s mind and, in effect, explains why Sonia bans Marina from attending Orlando’s wake.  Without those words and if Marina were a cisgender woman, would we think Sonia’s reaction – the reaction of a wife whose husband left her for a woman twenty years younger – abominably cruel (however painful it might be for the grieving heroine)?

Marina nevertheless appears at the wake – briefly, before she’s asked to leave.  Afterwards, she’s forced into a car full of male mourners, including Bruno (Nicolás Saavedra), Orlando’s viciously nasty son from his first marriage.  After they’ve hurled homophobic abuse at Marina, two of the car’s passengers bind her face with tape so tightly that it distorts her features.   Even though this is the film’s most upsetting sequence, Lelio flattens out the essential difference between the assault and Sonia’s verbal brickbats:  the family members, he seems to be saying, are equally intolerant of and vile to Marina, just in different ways.  Among the Onettos, Orlando’s brother Gabo, his partner in the family textiles business, is alone in treating Marina with something approaching sympathy.  Lelio presents Gabo as ineffective and ignored; exiting from the wake to offer Marina an apology of sorts, he limps his way towards her, one of his legs in a plaster cast.  Since he’s played by Luis Gnecco (Neruda), the strongest actor and presence in the supporting cast, this isn’t, however, quite how Gabo comes over.  Lelio is more successful in demonstrating that women are as unkind as men are to Marina.   At the eatery where she waits tables, she’s confronted by Adriana Cortés (Amparo Noguera), the head of a Sexual Offences Unit, who pressures Marina into a physical examination.  The female detective watches scornfully as a male colleague takes photographs of Marina’s naked body.  Cortés has by now morphed into a sneering villain to rival Bruno.

The prevailing vibrant colours, in combination with the gender-bending theme, have led some critics to compare Lelio to Almodóvar in his prime.  There are magic realist moments that justify the comparison – especially Marina walking in a street, fighting to stay upright against a gale-force wind that blows up a storm of litter in the air around her, and bending forward into a nearly gravity-defying position.  But except for a few such highlights, the adjective of the film’s title has a double meaning in only a technical sense:  it expresses simple, unequivocal admiration of the leading lady.  A Fantastic Woman, for all its political relevance, is traditional in the simplicity of its moral scheme.  Just because a transgender woman couldn’t have been a Hollywood heroine in times past doesn’t mean that Lelio isn’t setting up a good vs evil opposition every bit as stark as those in antique screen melodramas.  (The characters of Wanda and Gaston are refreshing in Lelio’s scheme because they’re written and played as more fully human than Marina’s various adversaries.)

Not all the fantastical elements are imaginative.  As long ago as Ghost (1990), the central love affair between the living and the dead had to be given a comic twist, in the form of Whoopi Goldberg’s medium, to make it easily acceptable to audiences.  In A Fantastic Woman, Marina twice experiences Orlando post-mortem:  the second time, they embrace in a crematorium shortly before his corpse heads for the incinerator.  Lelio takes it as read that these interactions are more than sentimental cliché because Marina is transgender.  They bring to mind the consoling conversations in Sally Wainwright’s Last Tango in Halifax between the Sarah Lancashire character and her recently deceased wife, played by Nina Sosanya.  Last Tango is one of the best (and one of my favourite) television dramas of recent years but these bits grated:  Wainwright seemed to think that, because this had been a gay relationship, the desperate make-believe of contact beyond the grave was necessarily transformed.  I don’t see how this is so.  Although it’s far from their intention, I think Lelio and Wainwright discriminate against LGBTQ characters by fobbing them off with tropes that are hand-me-downs from straight love-is-stronger-than-death stories.

A Fantastic Woman derives much of its power from Daniela Vega and her own identity as a transgender woman.  She and Marina may be very different personalities but Vega told Jonathan Romney in a Guardian interview that many of the transphobic insults in the script are ones she herself has received – she drew up a list of them for Sebastián Lelio.  Also like her character, Vega is a singer and it’s when she sings in the film that she’s at her most expressive.  This is true of the pop song in the club at the start, all the more true of the operatic pieces she performs in the later stages.  Vega’s pleasant, sinuous voice in the opening number hardly prepares you for the poignant beauty of her higher-pitched opera vocals.   The music is strong in all respects, including the alternating stabs and ripples of Matthew Herbert’s score.  Marina’s urgent accompaniment to ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’, on the radio of Orlando’s car, which she’s about to hand over to Sonia, is no less effective for being obvious.  Vega, in only her second movie role, is consistently forceful, though her acting is never as emotionally fluid as her singing.  For Lelio, this is probably beside the point. He is using Daniela Vega’s face and body to make a political statement (however much they both deny this).  Dissolving the distinction between the character and her interpreter will disarm criticism, as far as many in the audience are concerned.

Lelio and his DP Benjamin Echazarreta don’t share Adriana Cortés’s voyeurism; they keep a distance during Marina’s medical examination.  As Ryan Gilbey notes in the New Statesman, when Marina ‘does appear almost naked near the end of the film, it is on her own terms, with a clever bit of prop placement that conceals in one sense and illuminates in another: clasped between her thighs as she reclines on the bed is a shaving mirror, reflecting her face’.   (Alongside Marina is Orlando’s dog – an odd echo of a scene late in Lelio’s previous film Gloria (2013), when the title character lay naked on bed beside her neighbour’s Sphynx cat.)  According to Time, Lelio’s film challenges viewers by asking us ‘what are you seeing in me?’   This has the whiff of a trick question.  If you see a transgender woman, you’re qualifying Marina’s womanhood; if you see a woman, you’re ignoring her special identity.  Perhaps it’s best to see a human being who makes you root for her.  Whatever the response, it’s unarguable that we are seeing in Daniela Vega someone strikingly good-looking:  in this respect also, A Fantastic Woman is a Hollywood movie.  Whether or not we find Vega intimidating when her strong face, with its huge dark eyes, stares straight into camera, the effect would be very different if she were less beautiful.

6 March 2018

[1] At any rate in Chile, where, at present, it’s not legally possible to change gender identity on official documents without going to court.  Michelle Bachelet, about to step down as Chilean president, seemed to support changing the law in the light of the attention attracted by (and prestigious international awards, including the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, bestowed on) A Fantastic Woman.